The urbanet revolution: Sensor power to the people!

Urbanet sensor networks offer to build a large-scale, people-centric sensing platforms, which is composed of heterogeneous and potentially mobile sensors. Sensor networks and mobile ad hoc networks (MANET), together with Urbanets, create rich, open sensing environments where people, municipalities, and community organizations can share their resources to give mobile users real-time access to sensed data. Much of this data will be incorporated in novel applications running on personal mobile devices. Urbanets differ from first-generation sensor networks not only in their goal to support concurrent people-centric sensing applications across cities but also in their hardware and software heterogeneity, high volatility. Urbanets are distinguished from regular sensor networks by supporting concurrent user applications. An Urbanet middleware balances resource utilization across multiple applications and limit the geographic scope of the control updates.