Federated Secure Sensor Network Laboratory

Wireless sensor networks are more and more seen as a solution to large-scale tracking and monitoring applications. The deployment and management of these networks, however, is handled by a central controlling entity and the sensor network is often dedicated to a single application. We argue that this is due to the fact that we do not yet have the means to deal with a secure multi-purpose federated sensor network, running different applications in parallel and able to reconfigure dynamically to run others.The communication paradigms which have been usually devised for small and single owner sensor networks simply do not have the right scalability, security, reconfigurability characteristics required for this environment.

With FRESNEL we aim to build a large scale federated sensor network framework with multiple applications sharing the same resources. We want to guarantee a reliable intra-application communication as well as a scalable and distributed management infrastructure. Orthogonally, privacy and application security should also be maintained. We evaluate our proposal though a large scale federation of sensor networks over the Cambridge campus. The sensors monitor different aspects (temperature, pollution, movement, etc) and the network will be running various applications belonging to different authorities in the city.