Flexible and efficient sensor data processing – A hybrid approach

Abstract

The integration of various sensor data into existing software systems is becoming increasingly important for companies and even private users. As the number of embedded devices of all sorts (sensors, mobile phones, cameras etc.) also constantly increases, the development of flexible sensor applications gets more and more difficult. These applications have to handle a large number of sensors transmitting their data in various formats using different protocols. Middleware technologies are a good way to hide the complexity of communication protocols and data processing from the application. However, integrating efficient sensor data processing into a middleware requires several design choices which depend on the planned applications. Usually such systems are either efficient, allowing the processing of large numbers of data streams, or flexible, allowing the easy modification of the processing during runtime. In this paper a hybrid approach is introduced combining the benefits of two popular processing technologies, Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) and Data Stream Management Systems (DSMS), and by that enable the processing of large numbers of data streams while at the same time the system can be flexibly modified. Therefore these two technologies are analyzed to identify the benefits and disadvantages depending on their flexibility and efficiency.