A survey on multisource heterogeneous urban sensor access and data management technologies

Abstract

Urban sensors are an important part of urban infrastructures and are usually heterogeneous. Urban sensors with different uses vary greatly in hardware structure, communication protocols, data formats, interaction modes, sampling frequencies, data accuracy and service quality, thus posing an enormous challenge to the unified integration and sharing of massive sensor information resources. Consequently, access and data management methods for these multisource heterogeneous urban sensors are extremely important. Additionally, multisource heterogeneous urban sensor access and data management technologies provide strong support for intelligent perception and scientific management at the city scale and can accelerate the construction of smart cities or digital twin cities with virtual reality features. We systematically summarize the related research on these technologies. First, we present a summary of the concepts and applications of urban sensors. Then, the research progress on multisource heterogeneous urban sensor access technologies is analysed in relation to communication protocols, data transmission formats, access standards, access technologies and data transmission technologies. Subsequently, the data management technologies for urban sensors are reviewed from the perspectives of data cleaning, data compression, data storage, data indexing and data querying. In addition, the challenges faced by the technologies above and corresponding feasible solutions are discussed from three aspects, namely, the integration of massive Internet of Things (IoT), computational burden and energy consumption and cybersecurity. Finally, a summary of this paper is given, and possible future development directions are analysed and discussed.