Cloud4sens: a cloud-based architecture for sensor controlling and monitoring

This article discusses two strategies for managing sensing resources in the cloud and providing them as a service. The first strategy follows the data-centric model, where the cloud offers environmental data to its clients as a service, without any knowledge of how data are measured and processed. The second strategy adopts the device-centric model, which enables the cloud clients to use a virtual sensing infrastructure that they can customize for specific purposes. They can access sensed data and customize one or more virtual devices. The article also presents a cloud framework, called Cloud4Sens, that combines both the data-centric and device-centric models, enabling the end-user to choose which type of cloud service he needs. The proposed solution was designed according to the Sensor Web Enablement (SWE) specifications defined by the Open Geospatial Consortium and exploits well known technologies, such as XMPP (Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol) communications and X509 certificates.