CONIX Publication

City-scale sensing holds the promise of enabling deeper insight into how our urban environments function. Applications such as observing air quality and measuring traffic flows can have powerful impacts, allowing city planners and citizen scientists alike to understand and improve their world. However, the path from conceiving applications to implementing them is fraught with difficulty. A successful city-scale deployment requires physical installation, power management, and communications—all challenging tasks standing between a good idea and a realized one. The Signpost platform, presented at IPSN 2018, has been created to address these challenges. Signpost enables easy deployment by relying on harvested, solar energy and wireless networking rather than their wired counterparts. To further lower the bar to deploying applications, the platform provides the key resources necessary to support its pluggable sensor modules in their distributed sensing tasks. In this demo, we present the Signpost hardware and several applications running on a deployment of Signposts on UC Berkeley’s campus, including distributed, energy-adaptive traffic monitoring and fine grained weather reporting. Additionally we show the cloud infrastructure supporting the Signpost deployment, specifically the ability to push new applications and parameters down to existing sensors, with the goal of demonstrating that the existing deployment can serve as a future testbed.