A Scalable Sensor Management Architecture Using BDI Model for Pervasive Surveillance

Recent world events have amplified the need for improved safety and security to contend with natural and man-made threats. The universality and unpredictability of such threats have stimulated intense interest in smart pervasive surveillance systems. They are built by adopting smart sensor networks that cover large areas and can perform self-contained assessments of situations in the environment. However, such systems rely on a massive number of sensors with diverse capabilities but limited resources, e.g., power, processing, and storage. Thus, successful management of tasks hinges on the systems architecture. Sensor management architectures (SMAs) coordinate the sensor nodes and their resources in a manner that improves system control and situation awareness. This paper introduces a scalable and flexible SMA for many sensor management (SM) applications, particularly, pervasive surveillance. This novel SMA is called the extended hybrid architecture for SM (E-HASM), an architecture that combines the advantages of the holonic, federated, and market-based paradigms. The E-HASM models each node as an intelligent sensor by using the beliefs, desires, and intentions model and defines the interaction and cooperation among the nodes. The simulation results illustrate the performance of the E-HASM over a variety of security threats, background targets, and network sizes. The results prove that the proposed architecture is significantly more scalable and flexible than centralized architectures.