System Architecture Directions for Tangible Cloud Computing

The field of wireless sensor networks has produced a range of supporting hardware and software technologies that facilitate the creation of sensor network applications. Despite these advances, the implementation of wireless sensor network applications remains a complex task that requires domain experts and a significant investment of time and money. This level of investment is often infeasible for single applications, especially for those applications with a short life-cycle. This paper suggests a new direction in wireless sensor network research. We argue that next generation sensor network platforms should strive towards a shared infrastructure, multi-application paradigm, with a clean separation of concerns between infrastructure providers and application developers. These are principles that are well established in the field of Cloud Computing. This paper introduces our vision for future sensor networks, which we refer to as the 'Tangible Cloud'. To support this vision, we introduce a reference architecture and pricing model for sensor network resources.