NORS open source contribution going public – FINALLY
After a long uphill battle with Nokia’s legal and IPR departments, the NORS (Nokia Remote Sensing) platform is finally going public (see here)!
NORS provides a platform solution for mobile-centric wireless sensing, implemented as a centralized server with a collection of mobile devices acting as gateways towards local WSNs. This solution has been developed based on the original N-RSA (Nokia Remote Sensing Architecture) specifications (also available on the website above), work that started back in 2004 with Dana Pavel from Nokia Research and myself as project members in an internal remote sensing project. The mobile device solution is implemented in Java MIDP2.0 and provides therefore the basis for a large scale user base (several 100 million enabled phones)!
NORS is intended as a basis for research in this space and is, apart from being an OS contribution as such, seen as a contribution to the scientific community within the idea of SensorPlanet. NORS allows for easy extension of the actual platform (with LGPL enforcing to keep the platform open) while stimulating innovation on the application level. Research areas envisioned to stimulate include, for instance, research in adaptive communication (from centralized over P2P to ad-hoc), swarming, dynamic aggregation, integration of a variety of local WSNs and of course the research into particular vertical applications. For instance, NORS is used within a project at Cambridge University on pollution monitoring. In this project, bicylists and pedestrians are collecting environmental data from moving and stationary sensors, transfering the data in real-time towards a back end server, which in turn provides alerts to the mobile community. Also MIT MediaLab and other US universities have expressed interest in downloading and using the package within their efforts. Architecturally, the ideas of N-RSA and its possible extensions towards more flexible communication paradigms are currently integrated into the NSF GENI (Global Environment for Network Innovations) system specifications in a consortium of international researchers in this space.
In addition to these external efforts, an internal demonstration is under preparation. In the recent weeks, Elena Balandina, Ville Nenonen and Marion Hermersdorf have been working towards an instant meeting demonstration where a collection of stationary M2M devices (called N12 – Nokia used to sell these) is used to determine the occupancy and environmental information within the meeting rooms here at Nokia Research in Helsinki. The demo is almost finished (we’re struggling with some nasty deployment issues) and will go live rather soon for the Nokia Research audience. With this demo, employees will be able to determine the availability of meeting rooms even if the rooms are indicated as reserved in our current tools. The near term plans aim at extending this demo with WLAN indoor positioning (integrating currently in NORS), based on Marion’s work on this throughout this year, giving us the possibility to determine the nearest room available.
I hope that NORS will see a wide-spread usage in the wireless sensing community, placing mobile devices into the landscape of this research area. Open sourcing our results bears the hope of accelerating the research in this space.
There will be a separate Wiki page at the Nokia Open Source website soon. A Sourceforge project is currently under preparation and will be used as the main dissemination tool. Please check out the websites frequently. Most importantly, use NORS and provide feedback, either in Wikis, blogs or directly to me!