Sensor Networks’ Integration - Application and Multidisciplinary Aspects of Wireless Sensor Networks - page 103

private data stored online to make it always accessible. The pervasiveness of
Internet and its intertwining with everyday life has brought a number of new
requirements as well as problems together with the benefits it provides. Security
and data privacy present a big problem, with spam email, scams, and identity thefts
contributing a huge percent to the overall Internet activities.
In order to efficiently support these new trends, a number of activities have been
initiated in the last couple of years. Their intention is to design a new generation of
Internet, commonly known under the name of Future Internet. In Europe, these
efforts are primarily combined under the FP7 program and it is Future Internet
Assembly ( www.future-internet.eu ). In Japan, the driving force in this domain is
the AKARI initiative ( http://akari-project.nict.go.jp/eng/index2.htm ), in the USA it
is the Future Internet Network Design (FIND) project ( http://find.isi.edu ) and FIF
in South Korea ( http://mmlab.snu.ac.kr/fif ).
One of the main points that Future Internet will bring is the integration of the
physical and digital worlds, i.e., embracing the Internet of Things as one of its core
components. Numerous sensors, actuators, RFIDs, machines, and in general
“things” will become easily accessible to other Internet users and devices, thus
forming infrastructure that pervades into all aspects of our lives. This will enable
efficient interaction with the physical world, adaptation of Internet applications to
the users' contexts as well as influencing and changing the environment based on
the applications' settings.
The “things” will range from simple sensors measuring temperature or humidity,
to complex intelligent semantic systems capable of providing answers by combining
a number of inputs, simple sensors, actuators, and other network services like loca-
tion, security, and charging.
Before this vision becomes a reality, a number of technical, legal, socioeco-
nomic, and business challenges and issues have to be resolved. Discovery of infor-
mation and capabilities provided by different “things” in such distributed
environment, standardized description of the capabilities, scalability of solutions to
support huge number of connected “things,” how to trust the information provided
by unknown sensors embedded somewhere in the environment, how to protect
privacy of “things” providing the information, new business cases on which appli-
cations and services will be built and provided, how will people react and adapt to
such new Internet, etc. are just some of the challenges ahead.
In the following two sections, two projects dealing with some of these issues are
described. CommonSense is an industry-driven project, focusing on integration of
sensors and actuators in the mobile networks context. FP7 SENSEI is a large inte-
grated project under the EU FP7 program with a goal to design a framework for
integration of the digital and the physical worlds.

5.3.1 CommonSense

The CommonSense system [ 21 ] was proposed to enable the vision of ubiquitous
sensing where sensor networks provide the missing link between the virtual and