A middleware for fast and flexible sensor network deployment

A key problem in current sensor network technology is the heterogeneity of the available software and hardware platforms which makes deployment and application development a tedious and time consuming task. To minimize the unnecessary and repetitive implementation of identical functionalities for different platforms, we present our Global Sensor Networks (GSN) middleware which supports the flexible integration and discovery of sensor networks and sensor data, enables fast deployment and addition of new platforms, provides distributed querying, filtering, and combination of sensor data, and supports the dynamic adaption of the system configuration during operation. GSN’s central concept is the virtual sensor abstraction which enables the user to declaratively specify XML-based deployment descriptors in combination with the possibility to integrate sensor network data through plain SQL queries over local and remote sensor data sources. In this demonstration, we specifically focus on the deployment aspects and allow users to dynamically reconfigure the running system, to add new sensor networks on the fly, and to monitor the effects of the changes via a graphical interface. The GSN implementation is available from