The Communications Skin Challenges and Dangers for Ubiquitous Data Management 1.pdf

The Communications Skin: Challenges and Dangers for Ubiquitous Data Management1 Dimitrios Katsaros1,2 Yannis Manolopoulos1 Alexandros Nanopoulos1 Apostolos Papadopoulos1 1Department of Informatics 2Dept. of Computer Communication Engineering Aristotle University of Thessaloniki University of Thessaly 54124 Thessaloniki, GREECE 38221 Volos, GREECE {dimitris,manolopo,alex,apostol}@ delab.csd.auth.gr Abstract The recent technological advances in distributed information gathering from a given location or geographical region by deploying a large number of tiny microsen- sor nodes, and the progress of wireless communications along with the convergence of Internet technologies and mobile computing have totally reshaped the research and development agenda. This progress has created the anticipation for a communications skin, which will cover significant parts of our planet, and, similar to the human’s skin functionality, will gather information from its surroundings; it will process it, filter it, aggregate it, store it and finally make decisions based on it. The realization of such a vision requires the interplay of several disciplines, like hardware, communications and data management technologies. In this paper, will present the recent developments related to various critical as- pects of data management in wireless sensor network environments. The main goal of the paper is to highlight the most important dimensions of the new era for information manipulation, which resulted from this networking paradigm and also to present the specific dangers for the privacy, which come out from the deployment of sensor net- works. Keywords. Enabling Technologies, Wireless Sensor Networks, Sensor/Stream Data- bases, Pervasive Computing. Introduction The technological advances in distributed information gathering from a geographical region by deploying a large number of tiny microsensor nodes, and the progress of wireless communica- tions along