GSN in a nutshell
GSN is a software middleware designed to facilitate the deployment and programming of sensor networks.
GSN is a Java environment that runs on one or more computers composing the backbone of the acquisition network. A set of wrappers allow to feed live data into the system. Then, the data streams are processed according to XML specification files. The system is built upon a concept of sensors (real sensors or virtual sensors, that is a new data source created from live data) that are connected together in order to built the required processing path. For example, one can imagine an anemometer that would sent its data into GSN through a wrapper (various wrappers are already available and writing new ones is quick), then that data stream could be sent to an averaging mote, the output of this mote could then be split and sent for one part to a database for recording and to a web site for displaying the average measured wind in real time. All of this example could be done by editing only a few XML files in order to connect the various motes together.
Mathias Bavay, SLF, Davos, Switzerland says "Why is SLF deploying GSN? Thanks to GSN, SLF hopes to bring flexibility, efficiency and new features to its sensing networks. GSN already fulfills the first two points, and even if new features are already there, we hope that by working with the GSN team we could bring a whole new dimension to sensor networks by making them elegant data processing engines. Simply put, GSN is for us the future of sensing networks."
Currently, each sensor network deployment has its own software system for gathering, analyzing (application dependent) and publishing the data coming from the sensor network. GSN is developed based on the observation that most of the logical requirements of the applications developed for sensor networks are similar. Having each sensor network deployment using its own custom software not only increases the costs and times of deployment and development (reinventing the wheel for each application), but also makes it difficult (almost impossible in some cases) to integrate several sensor networks together (especially when managed by different authorities).
GSN is designed to make the sensor network application development a pleasure. The applications based on GSN are hardware-independent making the sensor network changes invisible to the application, for instance you can change the underlying sensor network from the Mica2 nodes to the BTNodes (with compatible sensing boards) without ever touching a single line of code in the application.
Now you have all the common sensor network requirements in one package plus the support for dozens of well known sensing hardware. Download GSN today and let us know about your experience.
GSN is distributed, for the general public, under the GNU General Public License (GPL) version 3 (or later). In case GPL don't suit your needs, please contact us.