Towards a scalable and interoperable global environmental sensor network using Service Oriented Architecture

Sensor networks are critical infrastructures for monitoring environmental variables, allowing evaluation of long-term trends and changes in the interaction of atmospheric, ecologic, and hydrologic processes. However, due to lack of coordination between large-scale environmental observation systems that have been set up around the globe, the wealth of information collected by sensor networks is not exploited to its full potential. Since there is no central organization tying these various systems together, data acquisition and dissemination methods are inconsistent and public accessibility to these observation systems is restricted to the methods chosen at the individual project level. The ability to easily discover, access, and interact with observational instruments and use real-time sensory data spread across different environmental observatories is limited. Interoperability of sensor network assets is essential to producing improved projections, models, analyses, and assessments at a global scale. To this end this paper presents the architectural design for a scalable, interoperable and real-time environmental sensor network. The proposed architectural design also provides support for dynamic reconfiguration of sensors in response to changing environmental conditions, and facilitates secure sensor access and delivery of observations to a distributed community of users using standardized mechanisms based on Open Geospatial Consortium standards. The outlined architecture uses an Event-Driven Service Oriented Architecture, with Enterprise Service Bus as its backbone messaging transport layer.