A Middleware-Based Approach to the Design of Interconnected Sensor/Actuator Networks

Sensor/actuator networks are becoming hierarchical, with wireless ad hoc networks interconnected via infrastructured wireless (e.g. the cellular network) and the Internet. This trend is being driven by new application domains such as cyber-ecological systems. In these systems, sensor/actuator networks and data centers form a geographically-distributed closed-loop system capable of near real-time sensing and actuation of the physical environment. To manage the complexity of this interconnected sensor/actuator network system, we describe the use of Data Turbine streaming middleware. Data Turbine enables management of real-time streaming data and provides persistent local storage for resilience to unreliable links. Here, we discuss Data Turbine's use in interconnected real-time sensor/actuator networks for closed-loop control scenarios. We describe how sensor/actuator networks and distributed real-time data centers can be interconnected with Java client applications using the Data Turbine API to accomplish closed-loop sensing, inference, control, and actuation in a test-bed cyber-ecological system, as well as discussing challenges and future work.