A cloud based — Architecture for cost-efficient applications and services provisioning in wireless sensor networks

More and more wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are being deployed. However, provisioning WSN applications and services in a cost efficient manner remains an uphill task. In the current state of affairs, WSN applications and services make little re-use of third party modules due to the lack of appropriate discovery mechanisms. Furthermore, they are bundled with the WSNs in which they are provisioned and this precludes the use of the same WSN by other applications and services. Novel approaches are indeed required. Cloud computing is an emerging paradigm with three key aspects (Software as a Service - SaaS, Platform as a Service - PaaS, and Infrastructure as a Service - IaaS) and several inherent benefits (e.g, efficient use of resources, easy introduction of new applications and services). It can potentially aid in tackling the cost efficiency issue in WSN applications and services provisioning. Unfortunately, this area has not yet received much attention in the research community. This position paper pinpoints the challenges, reviews the state-of-the-art, sketches a new architecture and proposes a research agenda.