Abstract

A wireless sensor network (WSN) is composed of spatially distributed nodes equipped with sensing devices to monitor environmental conditions like air temperature, wind speed etc, at different locations. WSNs are designed and deployed for different purposes by various organizations. The observations obtained from sensor networks may be helpful in many software applications like environmental, industrial, and meteorological monitoring. In this paper we explore the problem of making these observations accessible to software applications (These applications may or may not be running on the platform which has deployed the sensor network) We discuss the requirements for a middleware which will seamlessly allow any application to fuse/consume observations from different sensors belonging to same or multiple networks. Our work is based on standards developed by Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC). We will explore roles of sensorML, Observations and Measurements (O&M), Sensor Observation Service (SOS), Sensor Alert Service (SAS), Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP) for Multiuser Chat Systems (MUC) and Event Stream processing (ESP) in developing a middle ware that will virtually connect applications (observation consumers) with sensors (observation producers).