A holistic architecture for the Internet of Things, sensing services and big data

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) increasingly enable applications and services to interact with the physical world. Such services may be located across the Internet from the sensing network. Cloud services and big data approaches may be used to store and analyse this data to improve scalability and availability, which will be required for the billions of devices envisaged in the Internet of Things (IoT). The potential of WSNs is limited by the relatively low number deployed and the difficulties imposed by their heterogeneous nature and limited (or proprietary) development environments and interfaces. This paper proposes a set of requirements for achieving a pervasive, integrated information system of WSNs and associated services. It also presents an architecture which is termed holistic as it considers the flow of the data from sensors through to services. The architecture provides a set of abstractions for the different types of sensors and services. It has been designed for implementation on a resource constrained node and to be extensible to server environments. This paper presents a 'C' implementation of the core architecture, including services on Linux and Contiki (using the Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP)) and a Linux service to integrate with the Hadoop HBase datastore.