Design and Implementation of a Sensor-Cloud Platform for Physical Sensor Management on CoT Environments

The development of the Internet of Things (IoT) has increased the ubiquity of the Internet by integrating all objects for interaction via embedded systems, leading to a highly distributed network of devices communicating with human beings as well as other devices. In recent years, cloud computing has attracted a lot of attention from specialists and experts around the world. With the increasing number of distributed sensor nodes in wireless sensor networks, new models for interacting with wireless sensors using the cloud are intended to overcome restricted resources and efficiency. In this paper, we propose a novel sensor-cloud based platform which is able to virtualize physical sensors as virtual sensors in the CoT (Cloud of Things) environment. Virtual sensors, which are the essentials of this sensor-cloud architecture, simplify the process of generating a multiuser environment over resource-constrained physical wireless sensors and can help in implementing applications across different domains. Virtual sensors are dynamically provided in a group which advantages capability of the management the designed platform. An auto-detection approach on the basis of virtual sensors is additionally proposed to identify the accessible physical sensors nodes even if the status of these sensors are offline. In order to assess the usability of the designed platform, a smart-space-based IoT case study was implemented, and a series of experiments were carried out to evaluate the proposed system performance. Furthermore, a comparison analysis was made and the results indicate that the proposed platform outperforms the existing platforms in numerous respects