A publish/subscribe architecture for sensor networks and applications

The rapid emergence of computation enabled sensors and the applications that consume the sensor data introduce the need of new software architecture to enable the rapid development of applications that depends on the data from multiple sensor networks. We present the Subscribe/Notification architecture for connecting a wide range of sensors, actuators and applications in a robust fashion. The data elements which are routed to one or more applications are generated from sensors inside of sensor networks whose internals can be hidden from participants. This architecture consists of an overlay network of well-connected dedicated machines that provide topic subscription, data stream routing and notification sending from sensors to applications. It also supports filtering and stream data buffering between sensors and applications. Under this architecture, the tight couple between sensor networks and its applications is broken, and instead the sensor networks are transparent to the application. Experiments show that this architecture is reasonable and achieves good result.