2015 IEEE First International Conference on Big Data Computing Service and Applications
Big Data Sensing and Service: A Tutorial
Jerry Gao
Computer Engineering Department School of Computer Science
San Jose State University, CA, USA Shaanxi Normal University, Xi’an, China
Corresponding mail: jerry.gao@sjsu.edu leilihui@snnu.edu.cn
Abstract — As the advance of the Internet of Things (IoT), more
M2M sensors and devices are connected to the Internet. These
sensors and devices generate sensor-based big data and bring new
business opportunities and demands for creating and developing
sensor-oriented big data infrastructures, platforms and analytics
service applications. Big data sensing is becoming a new concept and
next technology trend based on a connected sensor world because of
IoT. It brings a strong impact on many sensor-oriented applications,
including smart city, disaster control and monitor, healthcare
services, and environment protection and climate change study. This
paper is written as a tutorial paper by providing the informative
concepts and taxonomy on big data sensing and services. The paper
not only discusses the motivation, research scope, and features of big
data sensing and services, but also exams the required services in big
data sensing based on the state-of-the-art research work. Moreover,
the paper discusses big data sensing challenges, issues, and needs.
Keywords—Big Data Sensing, Sensor-Based Big Data Analytics,
Internet of Things, Sensor Cloud, Sensor Big Data
I. INTRODUCTION
The Internet of Things (IoT) is changing the nature world
we live into a global connected sensor world in which massive
number of sensors and devices are connected to the Internet,
and generate large-scale and massive amounts of sensor-
oriented big data. According to Cisco1, the sensor market is
going to be a $19 trillion market within the coming years,
including a projected $2.9 trillion market for manufacturing.
Figure 1. Internet of Things Was Born” Between 2008 and 2009 2
[Source Cisco IBSG April 2011]
In 2013, International Data Corporation (IDC)3, the global
IoT market stood at around $1.9 trillion, and around 90 percent
of all IoT devices being installed in the world's developed
regions. Based on IDC’s predication, the global IoT market is
expected to grow by more than $5 trillion over the next six
years, will research to $7.1 trillion by 2020.
1
https://datafloq.com/read/sensor-data-internet-save-lot-money/88
2
Dave Evans, “the Internet of Things – How the Next Evolution of the
Internet is Changing Everything”, Cisco White Paper, April 2011.
3
http://www.zdnet.com/article/internet-of-things-market-to-hit-7-1-
trillion-by-2020-idc/
978-1-4799-8128-1/15 $31.00 © 2015 IEEE
DOI 10.1109/BigDataService.2015.45
Lihui Lei Shui Yu
School of Information Technology
Deakin University, Australia
shui.yu@deakin.edu.au
As the advance of the Internet of Things (IoT), more
machine-to-machine sensors and devices are connected to the
Internet [1-3]. These sensors and devices generate sensor-based
big data and bring new business opportunities and demands for
creating and developing sensor-oriented big data
infrastructures, platforms and analytics service applications.
Big data sensing is becoming a new concept and next
technology trend based on a connected sensor world because of
IoT. It brings a strong impact on many sensor-oriented
applications, including smart city, disaster control and monitor,
healthcare services, and environment protection and climate
change study.
Although there are many papers addressing different topics
in IoT and sensor clouds, only a few papers focusing on big
data sensing after this term has been coined by F. Giannotti’s
group4 in 2012, according to our recent literature survey [5, 6].
People believe that this could be the next exciting wave
following the wave of IoT. As the advances of cloud
computing and big data service and applications, people have
many questions about “big data sensing and services”. Here are
typical ones:
- What is big data sensing?
- Why is it important to us?
- What kinds of big data sensing services and
applications?
- What are big data sensing infrastructures, platforms,
and services?
- What are the current advances and state-of-the-art
research work in big data sensing and services?
- What are the underlying challenges and issues?
This paper is written to attempt to answer most of these
questions. As a tutorial paper, it is written to provide the
informative concepts and taxonomy on big data sensing,
including its definitions, motivation, scope, and features. The
paper exams the required services in big data sensing based on
the state-of-the-art research work. Furthermore, it discusses big
data sensing infrastructure and a reference framework
supporting big data sensing and services.
This paper is structured as follows. Section 2 covers the
basic concepts about big data sensing and services, and
discusses its major objectives, motivations, scope, benefits, as
well as classified big data sensing services. Section 3 discusses
different types of big data sensing services and their
classifications based on the recent existing research work.
4
F. Giannotti, et al. (2012), “A planetary nervous system for social
mining and collective awareness”, The European Physical Journal
Special Topics, 214: pp. 49–75.
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Section 4 focuses on the discussions of the infrastructures and o Community big data sensing – It refers to a shared massive
architectures in big data sensing and proposes a reference data sensing infrastructure for many organizations and
infrastructure for big data sensing services. Finally, Section 5 enterprises to form a community environment to support the
presents the challenges and issues for future research. deployment and execution of diverse sensing data analytics
applications based on big data collected from sensors. This
shared community environment may be orchestrated and
II. UNDERSTANDING OF BIG DATA SENSING AND SERVICES managed by the organizations or a third party and may exist
on premise or off premise.
A. What is Big Data Sensing? - Business service models, which include different business
Big data sensing is the unification of heterogeneous WSN services models for big data sensing and services. Details
data sources originating from various sensing domains into a are discussed later.
uniform cloud storage platform for the purpose of provisioning,
metering and analyzing the hence stored data. This
conglomerate of such sensor network data stored on a cloud
storage infrastructure can be referred to as big data sensing.
Big Data Sensing (BDS) is an emergent paradigm which
leverages big data computing & services, sensor cloud
computing & services, and Sensors and Sensor Networking to
provide on-demand sensor-oriented big data computing
infrastructures, platforms, services, and SaaS applications.
A BDS system usually is developed to provide users with
on-demand, scalable, and tenant based big data analytics
services for diverse domain applications. Typical applications
include smart city control and monitor, environment protection
and analysis, disaster evaluation and forecasting, medical Figure 2. Big Data Sensing and Service Rack
healthcare monitor and response, etc.
As shown in Figure 2, big data sensing and service rack
includes four tiers. They are listed below.
- Resource Pool, which includes four types of resources in
the big data sensing resource pool. They are: sensors,
sensor networks, computing and storage servers, internet
and mobile networks, as well as sensor-oriented big data.
- Network infrastructure, which includes wireless networks
and Internet, which provides network connectivity among
sensors, and sensor networks, as well as data sensing and
analytics service software.
- Deployment Models, which include four different
deployment models: a) private big data sensing, b) public Figure 3. Major Features of Big Data Sensing
big data sensing, c) community big data sensing, and d)
hybrid big data sensing. Their detailed definitions are Figure 3 displays the essential features in big data sensing.
listed below. They are listed below.
o Public big data sensing - It refers to a public and external - Big data sensing clouds – Different types of big sensor
data sensing infrastructure and environment, owned by a clouds will be deployed to provide diverse big data
third-party as a data sensing service provider. In a public big sensing services to various tenanted users based on diverse
data sensing infrastructure, various data sensor resources sensing networks and resources.
(sensors and sensor networks) are dynamically provisioned - Automatic data sensing prevision – This refers to
to form a virtual sensor cloud to support the deployment and automatic provision for big data sensing services,
execution of diverse data sensing analytic applications based including sensor network resources and provision, sensing
on sensor-oriented big data in a pay-as-you-go billing model
based on service-level-agreements (SLA). The authors in
data provision, and sensing data service provision.
[10] introduced a method to reduce resource usage needed - Big data sensing security – Ensuring the security in big
on sensor nodes. data sensing requires well-defined security polices,
o Private big data sensing - It refers to an internal data solutions, and technologies at the different levels in big
sensing infrastructure and environment, which is data sensing service systems and environments.
constructed based on massive private sensor networks for - On-demand data sensing services – Diverse big data
enterprises to host private computing resources, high risk sensing services can be delivered to respond both on-
data store, hide internal communications from public web- demand and scheduled services. On-demand sensing
based services and applications, and connect to public
services address the dynamic needs for big data sensing
clouds for global accesses.
and analytics.

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- Elastic data sensing scalability – This refers to the elastic
scalability in a big data sensing infrastructure and
environment by using load balance and scalability
solutions to achieve the scalability in sensor resources,
sensing data, and large-scale sensing service requests.
- Monitor & measurement and billing – This refers to the
capability of monitoring and measurement for various big
data sensing resources and services. Based on the resource
usages and provided service, users will be charged in a
pay-as-you-go billing model following pre-defined service
level agreements
- Multi-tenanted accesses and services – This feature is
critical to different application users to fulfill their diverse
needs and expectations by providing cost-effective
software upgrading and maintenance in big data sensing
and analytics.
- Big sensing data collection and management – This
provides basic sensor data collection, data store, data
management, data search and accesses.
B. Why Big Data Sensing and Services?
There are a number of primary reasons to study and
develop big data sensing and services. They include:
- Increase and maximize the usage and sharing of sensor
networks & sensor-oriented big data.
- Reduce the costs of sensor network management, monitor,
and maintenance in a large-scale by leveraging sensor
clouds.
- Provide a global connectivity to diverse senor networks
and their data via sensor clouds
- Offer elastic scalable on-demand sensor-based big data
analytics for multi-tenants.
- Provide easy and seamless access interface and
connectivity to any sensor networks to obtain diverse
sensor-based big data at anywhere and anytime.
- Provide cost-effective sensor-oriented big data collection,
management, storage, as well as accesses.
- Provide easy and efficient sensor-oriented big data
analytics supporting domain specific applications.
Big data sensing infrastructures and service solutions bring
the following major benefits to sensor service vendors and
stakeholders.
- Increase or even maximize the usage of sensors and sensor
networks
- Easily reach out to public users and connect to data
sensing application vendors
- Reduce the maintenance and upgrading costs by
leveraging and outsourcing to sensor cloud service
vendors
- Create diverse business models and opportunities to
generate revenues from their sensors and sensor networks
- Use cost-effective and efficient ways to monitor and
management sensor and senor networks resources
- Eliminate sensor data management and storage issues by
leveraging cloud-based sensing big data platform
solutions.
For big data sensing users and application vendors, big data
sensing and services brought them the following benefits.
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- Offer them a tenanted virtualized sensor cloud based
infrastructure with massively connected sensors and
sensor networks.
- Provide them a ready-to-use sensing data platform to build
and deploy diverse sensing data applications.
- Give them a seamless connectivity channel to access
large-scale sensor-based big data for data analytics.
- Furnish a sensing data analytics platform which allows
them to conduct diverse big data analytics projects with
provided and selectable data analytics models and
solutions.
- Obtain on-demand data sensing and services in a pay-as-
you-use business model.
- Allow them to work on a new data sensing workflow
process with a great flexibility, which allows users to
achieve automatic sensor data provision, collection,
storing, and accessing.
- Extend their sensing data analytics solutions with a great
selection on models, algorithms, and solutions to set up
domain-specific sensing data analytics applications and
services.
C. The Research Scope of Big Data Sensing
What is the scope of big data sensing and services? Figure
4 shows its major components and related subjects in big data
sensing and services.
Figure 4 Big Data Sensing Infrastructure Rack and Scope
- Big sensing resource tier – This includes four types of
hardware resources: a) sensors and sensor networks, b)
Internet and mobile networks, c) computing servers, and
d) big data storage servers.
- Big sensing infrastructure tier – This refers to a cloud-
based big sensing infrastructure that provide users a
visualized sensor infrastructure based on four types of
connected resources, including sensors/sensor networks,
computing and storage servers, and internet and mobile
networks. This infrastructure allows users to obtain on-
demand services in sensor prevision & management,
virtualization, monitoring and billing with high scalability
and multi-tenancy.
- Big sensing service tier – This includes three types of
services:
 o Big sensing data services – These services provide
sensor-based data prevision, collection, transmission,
storage, management, query, and search. If a system is
created to respond and delivery various big sensing
data services as a service, then the system is known as
big sensing data- as-a-service (BDaaS).
o Big sensing data platform services – When a service
system is developed to support users to develop,
validate, deploy, host, and maintain diverse big data
sensing services, then the system is known as big
sensing data service platform.
o Big sensing data analytics services – This refers to
sensor-based data analytics applications and services
that support diverse data learning & analysis,
validation, and visualization using data mining and
machine learning algorithms and solutions. When a
big sensing data analytics platform can be developed
to allow users to develop, deploy, host, and upgrade a
big data sensing analytics service system.
- Big sensing application service tier – This refers to
various types of sensor-oriented data application programs
that support domain-specific sensor-oriented data mining,
modeling, learning, analysis, decision making, and
visualization.
In addition the above, we need to pay special attentions to
other technical topics, including business and cost models,
green computing[18], resource prevision and virtualization
[12][14], sensing security[4][8], service scalability, data
mining and machine learning[16], and mlutitenancy.
Figure 5. Sensor Cloud Features
III. BIG DATA SENSING SERVICES
This section classifies and discusses different types of
important big data sensing services based on existing research
publications and the state-of-art practice.
One of popular big data sensing services is to provide
users with a virtualized sensing infrastructure as a service
based on their sensing requests and requirements by
leveraging a sensor cloud infrastructure. A Sensor Cloud is
defined by [15] as “a unique sensor data storage, visualization
and remote management platform that leverages powerful
cloud computing technologies to provide excellent data
scalability, rapid visualization, and user programmable
analysis can be knows as a sensor cloudā.
As shown in Figure 5, the essential features of a sensor
cloud include the followings.
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- Automatic prevision and management – A sensor cloud
provides the automatic sensor prevision and management
capability to allow users to create a virtualized cloud-
based sensor network infrastructure based on connected
sensors and sensor networks in a sensor cloud resource
pool. The related management service are provided too.
- Sensor/sensor network virtualization – In a sensor cloud,
massive sensor and network connections, configuration,
and virtualized grouping, classification, and management
in a sensor cloud.
- On-demand sensor service – This feature allows a sensor
cloud’s users to access diverse on-demand sensor and/or
senor network services.
- Elastic scalability - This refers to elastic scalability a
sensor cloud’s users to access diverse on-demand sensor
and/or senor network services.
- Monitor and Measurement – All sensors and sensor
networks in a sensor cloud are monitored and tracked for
their usage, operations, management service, as well as
their healthy status.
- Multi-tenanted management and accesses – Tenanted
based sensor cloud services are delivered to users based
on their desirable selections and customizations in sensor
data collection, transferring and formatting.
- Secured sensor data collection and transmission–
Although different sensors and sensor networks may have
diverse data parameters and formats for data collections
and transmissions, security policy and solutions must be in
place to support a sensor cloud to meet different security
requirements service vendors, sensor manufactures, as
well as multi-tenanted users.
- SLA-based billing – All of provided sensor cloud services
will charged by service vendors based on a sensor cloud’s
service-level agreements. Pre-defined cost models and
metrics are used to generate service bills.
A. SENSOR CLOUD INFRASTRUTURE-AS-A-SEVICE
To fulfill diverse needs from different user groups and
multi-tenanted users, it is necessary to provide virtualized
sensor cloud infrastructure-as-a-service (known as SIaaS).
SIaaS is a cloud-based sensing infrastructure service
software that supports the provision, management,
deployment, and hosting, as well as maintenance of diverse
virtual sensor infrastructures for multi-tenanted sensor
application users to deliver their on-demand services based on
massively connected sensors and sensor networks using the
pay-as-you-go billing model based on service-level-
agreements (SLA). Its major objective is to increase the
sharing and usage of massive sensors and sensor networks by
reducing the management and maintenance costs.
Recently, there is a few of papers addressing sensor
clouds and related issues. Authors in [12] proposed a
methodology for integrating wireless sensor networks by
leveraging cloud computing technology to form a sensor
cloud. Figure 6 shows the high-level sensor cloud
infrastructure and the associated workflow. It consists of
several major functional components, including automatic
provision, sensor control, monitor, web portal, as well as
sensor and sensor network visualization.
 Various sensor network owners can be connected to the
sensor cloud infrastructure by through the registration service.
They are allowed to update and maintain the underlying
physical sensors in their sensor networks. Users are allowed
prevision their virtualized sensor infrastructure. To cope with
diverse sensor networks and support their connectivity, the
sensor cloud in [16] allows users to create Service Templates
(ST) or Virtual Groups by subscribing data for particular
physical sensors, so users can easily add, remove or share
diverse configurations of ST and sensors.
Figure 6. A Sensor-Cloud Infrastructure [12]
Another published sensor cloud infrastructure is given
[12], as shown in Figure 8. The authors in this paper propose a
sensor-cloud architecture service system for collecting,
processing and storing sensor data originating from the
physical sensor networks. Using the sensor cloud, users are
allowed to collect sensor data from underlying wireless
physical sensor networks, and store them in a data store
through standard HTTP communications.
Figure 7. Sensor-Cloud – An Interaction View[12]
Figure 8. Sensor Cloud Architecture
[http://www.comp.nus.edu.sg/~urbandb/details.html]
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According to [13], this sensor cloud provides four functional
services below.
- Acquire – This service directly upload aggregated
wireless sensor data to a cloud’s data storages using
costumed REST APIs. All access data transactions are
encrypted with security solutions.
- Visualize - Visualize the previously uploaded data on a
sensor cloud. Since there are different sorts of scattered
physical sensors deployed, they propose a virtual sensor
group in place for the clients to have the capacity to utilize
sensors without agonizing over the locations and the
details of physical sensor network.
- Monitor – This allows users to customized alerts to keep
them informed about the data 24/7. E-mail and texting
service can be enabled to push alerts to users. In addition,
time-stamp and/or threshold trigging services can be
linked to the stored sensor data. The authors in [11] gave
an example to describe how to realize it.
- Analyze – This service helps users to analyze the pre-
processed data using any open data analytics application
service solutions. Users can define and customize
interfaces to perform common operations such as
smoothing and filtering of the data.
Since there are different kind of sensors scattered over the
spatial area, the authors in [12] proposes the concept of virtual
sensors and sensor groups so that users can prevision and use
the sensors without worrying about their locations and the
specifications. Using the sensor virtualization service, multiple
users can freely share, control and use physical sensors via
virtual sensors. Figure 9 shows an example. In a virtual sensor
cloud, different users may have different ways to control a
sensor through virtual sensors [9]. Similar to the previous
work, this sensor cloud also provides some common sensing
services, including publishing & brokerage, metering and
monitoring, management and registration.
Figure 9. Virtual Sensor Cloud and Sensors/Sensor Groups
The connectivity in sensor clouds is a very challenge issue
due to the fact that many sensors and sensor networks are
supported with different network protocols and technologies.
One interesting solution is to use a gateway as an open
interface to diverse connectivity. It includes two parts.
 Figure 10 OPENAPI Gateway Interfaces [14]

- Common Interface, which plays as a common interface for Table 1. Big Data Sensing Services
the gateway that connects to different sensor networks. Service Type Service Descriptions
The gateway receives the raw data from information from
Public/private/enterprise user registration
the correspondence ports. User subscription services
Multi-tenanted user service registration
- Data Processor, which retrieves data packets from the
gateway and processes it accordingly. Sensor/sensor network owner registration
Sensor/sensor network connection service
Figure 10 shows a good example, known as OPENAPI Resource services Mobile sensor/network owner registration
gateway interface [14]. It relies on relational database storage Mobile sensor/network connection service
to access the sensor metadata and store the sensor data received Provision/allocation/management service
from the sources. Its major advantage is providing a uniformed Virtual sensor/network registration
connectivity channel between a sensor cloud and diverse
Virtualization services Virtual sensor/network configuration/set-up
sensor networks. Achieving this requires two types of data
Virtual sensor/network specification/grouping
formats describing sensor data below.
Sensing data collection services
- Sensor Archive Data Format (SADF): defines request Sensing data formatting/processing service
and response data formats for accessing values stored in
Data sensing services Sensing data transmission services
a WSN data archive.
- Sensor Information Data Format (SIDF): describes Sensing data migration/synchronization service
methods and data formats for subscribing and delivering Sensing data validation and QoS services
real-time measurement data. Monitor sensor/sensor network healthy statues
Monitor & metering
Monitor virtualized sensors/sensor networks
Services
Monitor data sensing service transactions
B. SENSING DATA SERVICE AS A SERVICE (SDaaS)
User service account and charging models
Business and billing
SDaaS refers to an online-based sensor data service system services for data sensing Service billing based on service-level-
that supports and delivers various sensor data collection, agreements and cost models
storage, management, and transmission services based on an Collected big sensor data storage services
underlying sensor cloud infrastructure and environment. Its Big sensor data search and query access
Big sensor data storage
major objective is to provide tenanted based users and and management
services
applications with a centralized seamless interface to deal with Big data administration management (such as
sensor-based big data without knowing the details of back-up and replication)
underlying sensor networks and sensor clouds. These data Sensor/sensor network access security control
services could be delivered to respond dynamic on-demand Data sensing security
Secured sensor data collection and transmission
control
requests from users in a pay-as-you-use billing model. Table 1 Tenanted data sensing security policy control
shows a classification of big data sensing services.

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- Stakeholders and users
There are different types data sensing stakeholders and
users. They include: sensor/sensor network owners,
government agencies, business enterprises, pubic users, and
application systems. Figure 11 shows the interaction between
various stakeholders and represents the data flows between
them. Interaction between smart device developers and
industrial domain is crucial for feeding information to the
corporate open data platform. Industry will be responsible for
sensing and actuating infrastructure, but benefit from the
collected sensing data. Industrial need will also push smart
sensor vendors to create new and better sensors wiith effiicient
and green solutions.
Figure 11 System Consumers & Data Flow in data Sensing
- Data sensing services
Developing big data sensing services must consider the
following sensing data attributes.
• Data sensing mode: There are two ways supporting data
sensing operation modes: a) real-time dynamic and b)
static batch operation modes.
• Data sensing frequency and size: These are important
parameters for data sensing users as well as data
processing and storage. Managing and supporting diverse
data sensing frequencies and sizes for multi-tenant users
require special handling in data collection, and data
storage as well as sensor virtualization.
• Sensor data content and formatting: Sensor data could be
collected and presented in various formats: a) structured,
b) unstructured, and c) semi-formatted. This suggests that
different kinds of big database technologies and
processing solutions must be carefully selected and
integrated.
• Diverse sensor data types: In a sensor cloud, different
sensors and sensor networks usually are set-up and
connected at its physical level. These sensors and sensor
networks could use different data types. Segregating and
supporting diverse sensor data and related types is very
important and critical in big data sensing services.
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• Sensing data transmission: Similar to wireless sensor
networking, big data sensing must support data
transmission between sensors/sensor networks and back-
end servers and data stores.
o Data transmission mode – There are two types of data
transmission models: a) the synchronized-mode, in
which sensor data are always connected and sensor
data are collected dynamically in real-time for data
transmissions; or b) the asynchronized mode, in which
sensor data are collected in asynchronously.
o Data transmission protocols – Diverse data
communication protocols are deployed and used for
sensor data communications, including wireless
internet, WiFi, Bluetooth, 3G/4G, and etc.
Figure 12. Service Life Cycle [17]
- Service Model
For big data sensing services, cloud computing and
wireless sensor networks forms two major services. In [14],
authors proposed a concept service model shown in Figure 11.
Some entities are explained below.
- Service template, each of which represents a collection of
the same type of sensor resources and devices;
- Service instance, which refers to wireless sensor network
service. Each template stands for one type of service
instances;
- Service provider, who creates and defines service
templates;
- Service requester, who requests and uses different
services through templates;
- Template repository, which stores and hosts diverse
service templates.
This model focuses on the service availability for end users.
Each service provider offers the service templates as a service
catalog to service requesters, and allows them configure their
services based their needs. As a result, a service instance will be
generated for each request according to the selected service
template. This service approach provides a good advantage to
meet diverse service needs from users. Later, the authors in
[17] present their extension work for additional services.
- Data storage services data service applications. The diverse on-demand service
requests from tenanted users will be responded and processed
Sensor-oriented data services is another essential services
using a pay-as-you-use billing model.
in big data sensing since it must connected to massive sensors
and sensor networks in its physical level and support sensor WikiSensing 5 could be considered as an example.
data storage and access with big data technology and WikiSensng is a sensor data management platform developed
infrastructure. The challenge arises when diverse sensor by the Discovery Sciences Group at the Department of
networks are connected and deployed due to the following Computing of Imperial College London funded by the Digital
reasons: City Exchange and Elastic Sensor Networks grants.
WikiSensing runs on top of IC Cloud, the group's cloud
- Different sensor networks may use different
computing infrastructure.
communication protocols, data formats, and data
structures. Wikisensing is built using the Concinnity platform (in
- Diverse users may have different requirements for data Figure 13) to address the collaborative big data sensing
sensing services in data collection schedules, formats, challenge using a crowd-sourcing approach, in which sensor
communications, the target big sensing data storage should networking vendors or service providers can register, connect,
be able to store polymorphic sensor data stream on a and manage big data sensing services in an easy workflow-
sensor cloud infrastructure securely. In [7], the authors based process. This platform concentrates on sensor data
proposed a distributed storage solution for the collection, fusion management, and analysis. In addition,
polymorphism sensor data stream in a cloud. It has three- Wikisensing aids crowdsourcing of data at the same time
level storage architecture: collating metadata to deal with its disparity and providing tools
to assess its trustworthiness. Similarly, the workflow system is
o The preliminary data feed layer is responsible for the
designed to address the multi-scale challenges whilst allowing
storage and dynamic update of the sensor data streams
integrated consumption of data to aid model based decision
(or the intermediate results).
making.
o The secondary data process layer is responsible for
the storage and dynamic update of the final processing
results.
o The final data persist layer is responsible for the
storage and additional update of the historical sensor
data.
In their approach, a central storage scheduling module
controls and synchronizes all the three layers and utilizes pre-
provided instructions and rules to keep the data consistency.
- Service Charging and Billing
In big data sensing, sensor data are the valuable resources
to users. It implements diverse cost models for business service
billing. A typical cost model must be computed based on the
following parameters:
- Involved location based sensor cloud resources (no. of
sensors/sensor clouds)
- Sensor data collection volumes, frequencies, scales and
resolutions Figure 13. The Concinnity Platform
- Data storage sizes, media types, and data management and As shown in Figure 13, the Concinnity platform consists of
administration services three parts:
- Data access meters, frequencies, and volumes
- A sensor data store, which provides collaborative data
Clearly, well-defined cost metrics should be provided to storage for schema-less sensor data with ontology
support big data sensing services using a subscription model or support;
a pay-as-you-go business model. - A workflow engine, which provides hierarchical
workflows for data sensing analysis with plug-in
C. DATA SENSING PLATFORM SERVICES architectures;
Another type of data sensing services is known as data - Application development environment, which supports
sensing platform-as-a-service (DSPaaS). It refers to a service data sensing collaboration, data/model integration, as
platform that provides users with necessary development well as publication services for data sensing applications.
models and tools as well as hosting environment to allow them
to define, develop, deployment, and hosting sensor-oriented 5
http://wikisensing.org/Documentation/documentation.html

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 Table 2. Analytics Services for Big Sensing Data
Big data analytics services On-demand/scheduled big data analysis
On-demand/scheduled big data mining
On-demand/scheduled machine learning
for decision making services
Big sensor data visualization
Software defined big data Software defined big data modeling & support
analytics services
Software defined big data analytics processes
and workflows
Software configured data analytics algorithms
and solutions
Software configured big data visualization
Big data security services Big data encryption and decryption services
Big data oriented security policy service
Big data program-oriented access control
Big data tenant-based user access control
Big data secured store/search/query/access
Big data QoS services Big data quality validation services
Big data model check services
Quality control and validation for big data
analytics solutions
QoS control and validation service for big data
decision makings
IV. CHALLENGES, ISSUES, AND NEEDS
With the fast advance of IoT, big data sensing will drive
the next big wave in providing diverse on-demand services
based on large-scale big data collected from massively
connected and managed sensors and sensor networks.
Here are major challenges and issues based on our
observations.
- Engagement and connectivity to diverse sensor networks
– A sensor cloud requires the connectivity and
engagement of different sensor network vendors and
service carriers. This will be a very challenge task which
requires good business models, incentive policies, and
government support. As given in Wikisensin.org, a crowd-
sourcing approach could be one alternative to achieve this.
- Lack of standardization – Today, the standardization
issue has been raised in the internet of thing community. It
is clear that it is very difficult to expect diverse sensor and
sensor network vendors to agree on the same
standardization on sensor data formats and communication
messages. However, it is possible to provide certain
standardized data sensing gateways and unified interfaces
to support the connectivity between sensor networks and
sensor clouds.
- Lack of cost-effective security and privacy solutions in
big data sensing – Security attacks against wireless
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sensor networks are not new issues [4, 8]. In big data
sensing, security issues must be examined in two different
areas. One of them is sensor cloud security, which needs
hardware resource-based security management (such as
IAM), access control, and secured communication
protocols for underlying sensor networks, cloud
networking, big data storages, and computing servers.
The other is the privacy concern and security
requirements in big data sensing. According to our recent
interviews with IoT users in different domains (i.e.
Environmental and Smart City IoTs), there are two
special security and privacy challenges and needs in big
data sensing. First, there are diverse sensor information
privacy policies from government agency, enterprises,
and location-based regions. This demands tenant-based
security policies and solutions which must support easy
configuration and customization for users. Next, sensor-
based data may need to be stored and encrypted for
security needs. This requires new encryption and
decryption approaches to support large-scale secured data
searches, accesses, re-encryptions and decryptions.
-Multi-tenant on-demand big data sensing services – Like
cloud computing, multi-tenancy is a distinct feature in
sensor clouds and big data sensing services. Multi-tenant
users will have diverse requests and needs in the following
perspectives.
o Tenanted based sensor resource virtualization – This
implies that each tenant is allowed to virtualize
desirable sensors/sensor networks on an underlying
sensor cloud as its data collection resources in a static
or dynamic approach. This demands new and smart
sensor resource virtualization solutions to consider big
data sensing features and requirements, such as
regional sensor resources, sensor types, and security
and privacy policies.
o Tenanted based data collection and storage
requirements – Different enterprises may have their
desirable data collection time-intervals and schedules,
transmission protocols, data storage locations and
formats, even though they are stored in heterogeneous
storages and locations. In addition, a user may face
with multi-resolution scenario in a sensor cloud
because sensor data are collected based on a diverse
scale. Hence, a sensor data may be collected on a high
level will not match when it is combined with sensor
data that is collected on a microscopic level. Hence,
certain standardization solution must be provided for
resolving these multi-resolution and multi-scale
conflicts.
-QoS big data sensing and analytics services – There are
many open questions regarding to quality of services in
big data sensing and analytics services because there are
lack of QoS standards, processes, methods, and tools for
big data analytics and sensing. One of them is sensor data
quality. Since all of sensor data are generated from
disparate sensor sources, they may have faulty
calibrations or data tampering. This requires certain data
quality services for collected sensor data, including
filtering out data communication errors. The other is the
quality service for validating big data analytics results,
including the quality assurance of big data sensing based
decisions, predictions, and recommendations.
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