Abstract
The Internet of Things enables human beings to better interact with and understand their surrounding environments by extending computational capabilities to the physical world. A critical driving force behind this is the rapid development and wide deployment of wireless sensor networks, which continuously produce a large amount of real-world data for many application domains. Similar to many other large-scale distributed technologies, interoperability and scalability are the prominent and persistent challenges. The proposal of sensor-as-a-service aims to address these challenges; however, to our knowledge, there are no concrete implementations of techniques to support the idea, in particular, large-scale, distributed sensor service discovery. Based on the distinctive characteristics of the sensor services, we develop a scalable discovery architecture using geospatial indexing techniques and semantic service technologies. We perform extensive experimental studies to verify the performance of the proposed method and its applicability to large-scale, distributed sensor service discovery.