Dimensions

An important class of networked systems is emerging that involve very large numbers of small, low-power, wireless devices. These systems offer the ability to sense the environment densely, offering unprecedented opportunities for many scientific disciplines to observe the physical world. In this paper, we argue that a data handling architecture for these devices should incorporate their extreme resource constraints - energy, storage and processing - and spatio-temporal interpretation of the physical world in the design, cost model, and metrics of evaluation. We describe DIMENSIONS, a system that provides a unified view of data handling in sensor networks, incorporating long-term storage, multi-resolution data access and spatio-temporal pattern mining.