TinySOS: Design and implementation of interoperable and tiny web service for the internet of things

Monitoring the environment is critical for scientists to understand the environmental dynamics. However, the traditional monitoring systems such as sensor networks are usually labor-intensive and complicated to deploy. As the concept of citizen sensing has been proposed to include volunteers into the environmental monitoring systems, a key to realize the citizen sensing vision is to empower citizens with the low-cost and easy-to-use sensing devices. In this paper, we focus on two technologies that have the potential to realize the citizen sensing vision: the Internet of Things (IoT) and the world-wide sensor web. In order to address the issues from the decentralized and heterogeneous nature of IoT devices and sensors, we propose the TinySOS service, a tiny web server hosting a light-weight profile of Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Sensor Observation Service (SOS). By hosting open standard sensor web services on the IoT devices, not only the devices become self-describable, self-contained, and interoperable, but also the collected observations are accessible via the Internet as soon as they are measured. In this case, the sensor web can provide real-time sensor data streams in a much higher spatial and temporal resolution, which consequently allows scientists to observe phenomena that were previously unobservable.