Abstract
Surveillance has become one of promising application areas of wireless sensor networks which allow for pervasive monitoring of concerned environmental phenomena by facilitating context awareness through sensor fusion. Existing systems that depend on a postmortem context analysis of sensor data on a centralized server expose several shortcomings, including a single point of failure, wasteful energy consumption due to unnecessary data transfer as well as deficiency of scalability. As an opposite direction, this paper proposes an energy-efficient distributed context-aware surveillance in which sensor nodes in the wireless sensor network collaborate with neighbors in a distributed manner to analyze and aware surrounding context. We design and implement multi-modal sensor stations for use as sensor nodes in our wireless sensor network implementing our distributed context awareness. This paper presents an initial experimental performance result of our proposed system. Results show that multi-modal sensor performance of our sensor station, a key enabling factor for distributed context awareness, is comparable to each independent sensor setting. They also show that its initial performance of context-awareness is satisfactory for a set of introductory surveillance scenarios in the current interim stage of our ongoing research.
