Home // International Journal On Advances in Intelligent Systems, volume 5, numbers 3 and 4, 2012 // View article

A Generic Data Processing Framework for Heterogeneous Sensor-Actor-Networks

Authors:
Matthias Vodel
Rene Bergelt
Wolfram Hardt

Keywords: data aggregation; data fusion; data synchronisation; heterogeneous wireless sensor networks; sensor actuator systems

Abstract:
This paper presents a generic, energy-efficient concept for synchronised logging, processing and visualisation of arbitrary sensor data. The proposed framework enables a chronological coordination and correlation of information retrieved from different, distributed sensor networks as well as from any other self-sufficient measurement system. By relating data from different sensor data sources the overall information quality can be improved significantly. The implementation allows for easy cross-platform communication and facilitates readability by humans by employing the XML data format for data storage. Furthermore, the aggregated, heterogeneous sensor information can be converted into an extensible list of output formats. Depending on the application-specific requirements for visualization it is possible to consider additional meta-information from the test environment to optimise the data representation. The utilization of advanced data fusion techniques and pre-processing mechanisms enables a selective data filtering to reduce the network load. In order to evaluate basic usability requirements and the effectiveness of the proposed concept, an automotive sensor network is presented as a test system for the framework. For this demonstration, the available on-board measurement systems of a vehicle were extended by high-precision sensor nodes establishing a wireless sensor network and aggregating environmental and behavioural data on several test drives. Subsequently the correlated measurement information was converted and visualised for use with several professional data analysis tools, including jBEAM, FlexPro as well as Google Earth.

Pages: 483 to 492

Copyright: Copyright (c) to authors, 2012. Used with permission.

Publication date: December 31, 2012

Published in: journal

ISSN: 1942-2679