DASN: demand-addressable sensor network for active information acquisition

A corrigendum was issued for this paper on January 13, 2023. You can download the corrigendum from the supplemental materials section of this citation page.

In this paper, we propose a new type of sensor network called the demand-addressable sensor network (DASN). DASN actively gets desired information by delivering or addressing users' demands to appropriate places that are expected to have the information. This is in contrast to conventional sensor networks, which simply send sensed data to users. DASN is useful for finding desired information in a short amount of time from a large amount of sensed data generated by a large-scale sensor network. DASN is constructed with a demand-addressable network that integrates many reconfigurable wireless sensor networks and other existing systems. In addition to the demand-addressing mechanism, the demand-addressable network has an in-network data mashup mechanism. The mashed-up data are displayed on the user terminal without any need to install a dedicated application program. It can also mashup useful information acquired from systems already existing in the network without modifying each system. The functions of the reconfigurable wireless sensor network can be dynamically customized by injecting roles specified by the user. Thus, the user can actively get desired information by customizing the sensor network function. The main target of DASN is wide-area disaster site monitoring---for which the DASN features outlined above are suitable. In this paper, we present the concept underlying DASN, its architecture, and current status of development. We also present preliminary experimental results.