Motivation
A typical sensor network may consists of a number of sensor nodes acting upon together to monitor a region and fetch data about the surroundings. A typical WSN contains self-regulated sensors that can cooperatively monitor the environmental conditions, like sound, temperature, pressure, motion, vibration, pollution, fire like, and other application dependent events. Each node in a sensor is loaded with a raio transceiver or some other wireless communication device, a small microcontroller, and an energy source most often cells/battery. WSNs have some of the limitations, like in terms of memory, energy, computation, communication and scalability, efficient management of the large number of WSNs data.
Cloud computing allows the systems and users to use Platform as a Service (PaaS), for example, Operating System (Oss), Infrastructure as aService (IaaS), for example, storages and servers and Software as a Service(SaaS), for example, application level programs, and so forth at a very low cost which are being provided by several cloud providers (e.g., Amazon, Google, and Microsoft) on the basis of pay per use services (Atif Alanri, 2013). Cloud Computing platform dynamically available, configures, and updates the servers as and when needed by end uses. The limitations of WSNs are the pluspoints in the Cloud Computing.
This is the reason why the integrations of cloud computing & WSNs will lead to greater benefits & efficiency.
What Is Sensor-Cloud Infrastructure?
Sensor-Clod infrastructure i.e. integrated version of Wireless Sensor networks and Cloud Computing is powerful and scalable high-performance computing and massive storage infrastructure for real-time processing and storing of the WSN data (online as well as previously collected ofline) as well as analysis of the processed information to extract events of interest.
Some of the Definitions of Sensor Cloud Architecture
AN Infrastructure that allows truly pervasive computation using sensors as an interface between physical and cyber worlds, the data-compute clusters as the cyber backbone and the internet as the communication medium (Sajjad Hussain Shah, 2013).
It is a unique sensor data storage, visualization and remote management platform that leverage [sic ] powerful cloud computing technologies to provide excellent data scalability, rapid visualization, and user programmable analysis. It is originally designed to support long-term deployments of micro strain wireless sensors, Sensors-Cloud now supports any web-connected third party device, sensor, or sensor network through a simple open data API (J.Yick, 2008)
When WSN is integrated with cloud computing environment, several shortfalls of WSN like storage capacity of the data collected on sensor nodes and processing of these data together would become much easier. Since cloud Computing provides a vat storage capacity and processing capabilities, it enables collecting the huge amount of sensor data by linking the WSN and cloud through the gateways on both sides, that is, sensor gateway and cloud gateway. Sensor gateways collects information from the sensor nodes of WSN compresses it, and transmits it back to the cloud gateway which in turn decompresses it and stores it in the cloud storage server, which is sufficiently large (S.K. Dash, 2012). Sensor- Cloud is a new paradigm for cloud computing that uses the physical sensors to accumulate its data and transmittal sensor data into a cloud computing infrastructure (L.P.D. Kumar, 2012). Sensor- Cloud infrastructure is used that enables the sensors to be utilized on a digital infrastructure by virtualizing the physical sensor on a cloud computing platform according to the need of the user and application. These virtualized sensors on a cloud computing platform are dynamic in nature and hence facilitate automatic provisioning of its services as and when required by users.