Techniques for integrating sensors into the enterprise network

Cheap programmable sensor devices are becoming commercially available. They offer the possibility of transforming existing enterprise applications and enabling entirely new ones. The merging of sensor networks into the enterprise network poses some distinct problems. In particular, information from theses devices must be obtained in a way which minimizes their energy use and must be aggregated and filtered before being sent to the application server to prevent it from being overwhelmed. We describe a range of complementary techniques for integrating sensors into an enterprise network. These comprise new architectural entities within the enterprise network — edge server — new means of sharing information within the enterprise network — messaging binning — and new protocols for extracting information from the sensor network — Messo. © 2006, IEEE. All rights reserved.