PLASMA

Abstract

While sensor networks continue to attract significant interest in various research communities, high impact applications still have a long list of challenges to be addressed. An individual sensor system can provide important observations within a local area. However, local observations alone are not sufficient for some applications that require planetary scale coverage. Monitoring volcanic activity, nuclear disasters, magnetic field changes, migration patterns of species, pandemic disease spread patterns are some examples to such applications. These applications require a close interaction between different sensor networks with in-situ and remotely sensed observations. In this paper we describe our PLASMA (PLAnetary Scale Monitoring Architecture) project to motivate the challenges that need to be addressed at such scale. These include approximations in spatiotemporal attributes due to resource constraints and also multi-attribute visualization to enable a real-time user interface to the system.