A flexible and scalable message broker for sensor network integration

Abstract

Sensor network technologies have experienced an enormous development with the proliferation of sensor devices, custom communication protocols, and methods to exploit the data gathered on such networks. The actual impact of this technology on the enterprise, however, has been quite limited. This is because the community has focused almost exclusively on the sensor devices themselves, while paying little attention to the means to integrate this novel technology into the current enterprise infrastructure. We argue that facilitating this integration would encourage the adoption of sensor networks. Thus we present a scalable message broker for message-oriented middleware that is able to interact with any sensor network by providing a flexible and extensible communication subsystem. This message broker then provides the link to the messaging middleware used in the enterprise network. We describe the architecture of such a broker's communication subsystem and its implementation in Java™. We present the performance of the broker, demonstrating that it scales to interconnect many sensor networks and is able to cope with potentially very large amounts of data from the sensors' readings. Finally, we present an overview of the sensor protocols we have developed, and how they are integrated into the broker, enabling for end-to-end interaction with external enterprise applications unaware of the sensor technology. Copyright 2009 ACM.