SLAM: Scalable Location-Aware Monitoring Systems

SLAM is a scalable network architecture for integrating millions of real-world sensors with actuators and distributed software applications. SLAM will enable a broad variety of novel monitoring and control applications including rapid disaster response, scalable crime detection and prevention, facilities maintenance, asset monitoring, and navigation. SLAM solves three problems: (1) Full exploitation of a sensor’s data stream requires knowledge of contextual information, particularly location and time. (2) Fine-grained monitoring of millions of assets and facilities requires the physical deployment of sensors in the environment -- an intensive and cumbersome manual task. (3) Use of deployed sensors/actuators by distributed software applications requires network infrastructure.

The SLAM architecture has three main components that address these issues:

Cricket, a ubiquitous and precise location infrastructure. See the project description later in this section.

Medusa, a scalable, distributed stream processing system. See the project description later in this section.

An activated environment and efficient activation method. SLAM requires that the subject environment be activated with sensors and actuators. Without special attention, the activation process could become unmanageable due to the complexity of the environment. Therefore SLAM provides virtual location-based tagging, typically for immobile objects. The human installer “affixes” virtual tags to physical regions or objects by pointing at them with a Cricket-equipped handheld device, triggering an association of a unique identifier and the tagged entity’s location and other attributes in a persistent store. This eases environment activation.

We have made some progress on all three of its components. As a challenging test case, we plan to deploy SLAM on the MIT campus with millions of interesting entities. These include many sensors in offices, machine rooms, physical plant, and laboratories to monitor power, temperature, humidity, and pressure; smoke and fire detectors; burglar alarms and physical intrusion detection systems; motion detectors; monitors of leaks, floods, chemicals, and hazardous materials; large-scale theft- and crime prevention apparatus, and navigation aids. The goal is to monitor the university’s physical assets and improve the personal safety of over ten thousand individuals moving in and around thousands of offices, labs, and common spaces in hundreds of buildings.