The Urbanet Revolution: Sensor Power to the People!

摘要

The Internet has become a great success because it appeals to regular people. This isn't the case with sensor networks, which people perceive as "something" remote in the forest or on the battlefield. With mobile devices becoming ubiquitous, the time is ripe to bring sensor data out of close-loop networks and into our daily life. Urbanets offer a way to achieve this goal. Urbanets are spontaneously created urban networks consisting of mobile multisensor platforms, such as smart phones and vehicular systems, individual sensors incorporated in buildings or roads, and sensor networks deployed by municipalities. They give substance to the pervasive computing vision by supporting mobile applications that can sense the physical world anytime, anywhere. The authors focus on Urbanet programmability and present three distributed programming models together with their associated middleware. This article is part of a special issue, Building a Sensor-Rich World.