Integration of low computational power nodes in a GRID measurement architecture

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

The increasing diffusion of environmental monitoring systems demands for more flexibility in the management of the whole system and in a lower cost for the arrangement of each measuring unit. Both these requirements can be met by arranging the whole system as a GRID architecture and employing units that are based on low-cost micro-controllers or palm PCs. However, such kind of units does not exhibit enough processing capabilities to met the full GRID requirements. For this reason, the authors propose a proxy-based approach that allows low-cost measuring units to be integrated into a GRID architecture, by introducing the concept of virtual measurement GRID node. Such a node is mainly composed of a measurement front-end that communicates with a proxy GRID node, which exhibits the full GRID services. An example of virtual measurement node is proposed that is conceived for pollution monitoring and a prototype of measurement node is described that senses temperature and concentration of carbon monoxide.