Cloud-based Architectures for Environment Monitoring

Aiming to keep under control a particular system or environment or to ensure that it works as expected there is a need to know what-when-why happens there. Various conditions and environmental factors can lead to errors, unexpected behavior or loss of control. To pursue these factors manually is time consuming, error prone, slow and usually quite expensive. Monitoring is quite complex and challenging activity, but with recent advances of technology in many areas there is a good premise for automating almost each activity in monitoring of any system, process, and environment. The basic activity of monitoring is gathering data, which with high degree of accuracy will make us more informed, more aware and will help us to take more correct decision. This paper shows the main questions identified while trying to design architecture for an OpenSmartWorld environment monitoring system, the main characteristics which this kind of system should have and the technologies and standards proposed to be used in order to support required functionalities.