A Peer-to-Peer Distributed System for Multipoint Measurement Techniques

One of the main disadvantages of monitoring systems based on smart Web sensors is the difficulty to have a complete access to all data. In fact, nearly everyone of the actual available systems use proprietary embedded software to perform measurements, because only the manufacturer knows the internal hardware architecture and as servers exchange information. Moreover, those systems are not able to share information in a free way, because of using different implementations and protocols. The main goal of this paper is to present an implementation of a distributed measurement system, based on the web service approach. The proposed system is based on a freeware widely utilized technology, the Gnutella network, to route and share information adopting a low-cost hardware architecture. Gnutella, like most other peer-to-peer (P2P) applications, builds a virtual network with its own routing mechanisms at the application level. The implemented topology of this overlay network and the routing mechanisms have a significant influence on the application properties such as performance, reliability and scalability. The Gnutella architecture gives the possibility to create a monitoring network in which the clients are all connected without any user operation. In this paper, the authors describe the implemented Gnutella-based distributed measurement system and the architecture of the implemented prototype of low-cost smart web sensor.