Street corners: Architecture for correlation of networked environmental sensors

Wireless sensor networks can provide a wide range of information, gathered from both active and passive sensing. In urban environments, using an example application of environmental sensing on street corners, the benefit of active sensing, which includes monitoring and reporting of real-time data, such as calculation of passing traffic rate and measuring noise, can be easily seen. Passive information gathered from urban sensing might include sampling the air quality along a roadway for detection of road and urban pollutants. A network architecture has been developed to integrate active and passive sensor information gathered from urban environmental sensing networks. Depending on the active sensing information gathered, passive sensing information may be gathered, for integration with active sensing, and escalation for alert reporting. Using the selected illustration application of a wireless urban environmental sensor network, the correlation of information gathered in near real-time is presented and discussed.