Sensor Grid - Concept and History

Concept and History

The concept of a sensor grid was first defined in the Discovery Net project where a distinction was made between “sensor networks” and “sensor grids”.

Briefly whereas the design of a sensor network addresses the logical and physical connectivity of the sensors, the focus of constructing a sensor grid is on the issues relating to the data management, computation management, information management and knowledge discovery management associated with the sensors and the data they generate, and how they can be addressed within an open computing environment. In particular in a Sensor Grid is characterized by:

• Distributed Sensor Data Access and Integration: relating to both the heterogeneity and geographic distribution of the sensors within a sensor grid and how sensors can be located, accessed and integrated within a particular study.

• Large Data Set Storage and Management: relating to the sizes of data being collected and analyzed by multiple users at different locations for different purposes.

• Distributed Reference Data Access and Integration: relating to the need for integrating the analysis data collected from a Sensor Grid with other forms of data available of the Internet.

• Intensive and Open Data Analysis Computation: relating to the need for using a multitude of analysis components such as statistical, clustering, visualization and data classification tools that could be executing remotely on high performance computing servers on a computational Grid.