Abstract
The Web has reached its pinnacle of success with numerous systems and software programs having some sort of Web-based access to its data, functionality, and services. The integration of sensors/sensor networks and Web platforms (a.k.a. Sensor-Web) has transformed the Web into a more dynamic and real-time information sharing landscape. As a result of such integration, a lot of applications and services have come into fruition, such as social sensing, health monitoring, and environment monitoring—all of which leverage real-time sensory media feeds at a different level. The concepts like Sensor-Web Enablement, Web of Things (Internet of Things or IoT), and Sensor Cloud Integration opened up new opportunities for information processing, exchange, alerting, and notification for the greater good of people, society, and environment. Despite all these benefits of integrating sensors and Web, there are many challenges that need attention. Hence, this special issue focuses on open issues and challenges related to the integration of sensor networks, the Internet of Things, and the Web toward the development of innovative applications and services.
From an open call for papers, this issue attracted a total of 22 submissions. After a vigorous review process the guest editors' team recommended the publication of 6 papers. These papers cover the topics relevant to middleware support, application-driven IoT framework, Sensor-Web availability, WSN, and application of IoT based system.
The paper “QoS Aware Middleware Support for Dynamically Reconfigurable Component Based IoT Applications” by A. Agirre et al. shows how to provide runtime support for component-based distributed applications such as IoT ones. The proposal includes a QoS-aware self-configuration algorithm for maintaining stateful reconfiguration capability in the presence of internal and external reconfiguration events within a distributed application management platform. The other paper “Application-Driven OAM Framework for Heterogeneous IoT Environments” by J. Sterle et al. propose a heterogeneous operations, administration and management (H-OAM) framework for unifying the diagnostics and performance measurements of heterogeneous networks, which are common to IoT systems nowadays. The proposed solution provides effective monitoring, tuning, analyzing, and troubleshooting of heterogeneous applications and network connectivity in IoT systems, which has been demonstrated by the authors in a live mobile IoT testbed.
In sensor-web environment, it is important that the content published on the web is noise-free, especially the multimedia content. This has been studied in the paper “An Efficient Image Denoising Method for Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks Based on DT-CWT” by R. Sammouda et al. Here the authors propose an efficient method based on DualTree Complex Wavelet Transform (DT-CWT) for denoising of camera images whose quality had been degraded due to many conditions. The noise reduction was done by selecting an estimated optimal threshold value from the approximation of wavelet coefficients. Routing is an important issue in Sensor-Web systems, which has been investigated in the paper “Distributed Dynamic Memetic Algorithm Based Coding Aware Routing for Wireless Mesh Sensor Networks.” Here the authors S. Hamam and A. S. Almogren propose a routing algorithm as an improvement over the GCAR algorithm by incorporating a memetic algorithm and meme sharing among the sensor nodes. Simulation results showed improvements over GCAR algorithms in terms of finding optimal routes within a short time.
This special issue also covers other interesting issues. S. Ramalingam and L. Mohandas propose “A Fuzzy Based Sensor Web for Adaptive Prediction Framework to Enhance the Availability of Web Service.” The objective of this work is to achieve the availability of web services using heterogeneous Sensor-Webs in terms of web service response time and up time. The authors use a fuzzy logic (FL) based prediction and replication framework for their work. The last paper is by M. Mohaimenuzzaman et al., entitled “Enhancing Safety in Water Transport System Based on Internet of Things for Developing Countries.” Here the authors focus on developing a new model of Intelligent Water Transportation System (IWTS) based on IoT toward a sustainable system. According to IWTS, different monitoring devices comprised of machine-to-machine (M2M) technologies are installed in the water-based vehicles and the monitoring data are transmitted from the vehicle to the cloud service in definite intervals for analyzing and detecting emergency.
We hope this compilation from the selected papers would enrich our readers with enhanced knowledge and concepts about Sensor-Web systems, applications, and services.