On the Cost of Shifting Event Processing within Wireless Environments

With the emergence of wireless sensor networks, the challenges of event recognition and processing have been partially shifted into the embedded domain. While new processing capabilities on small devices allow for physically close event monitoring and fast filtering, new challenges due to sparse resources or medium contention when relying on wireless communication arise. Within this talk, a short introduction into an experimental setup featuring event-detection on a construction fence is given. The goal has been to distinguish a person climbing over the fence from other events, which it may be exposed to, with the help of a wireless sensor network. The results obtained will be presented thoroughly. Regarding those, we discuss in which situations distributed event recognition and processing is to be preferred over a conventional server-centered deployment. Therefore, the costs such as communication, hardware and deployment related costs implying an architectural decision are examined.