Scriptable Sensor Network Applications for Rapid Development of Internet of Things

Abstract

Internet of Things (IoT) refers to the paradigm of having sensor-enabled devices represented on a global inter-connected web. A sensor network is a customized network of sensor nodes deployed for a specific objective. Due its variety of application areas, objectives and end-user requirements of sensor networks can differ widely between deployments. Internet of Things, on the other hand, envisions a homogeneous presentation of information from sensor nodes for mining and analysis, irrespective of their heterogeneous sources. To tackle such conflicting requirements, we present RAPIDSNAP—a scriptable application framework for rapid deployment of sensor networks—which acts as a smart middleware to adapt sensor networks for Internet of Things. RAPIDSNAP provides script-based extensions to facilitate rapid deployment of customized sensor network applications while providing bridge-interfaces for integrating them with IoT repositories such as Wisekar. We illustrate the impact of RAPIDSNAP and Wisekar by using them to propose extensions to a sensor network based health application—Gaitsense. We conclude by comparing RAPIDSNAP with other script-based frameworks.