Data-driven Modality Fusion: An AI-enabled Framework for Large-Scale Sensor Network Management

TL;DR

This paper presents Data-driven Modality Fusion (DMF), a novel framework that reduces sensor deployment and energy use in smart city IoT networks by leveraging correlations between different sensing modalities, validated on real-world data.

Contribution

The paper introduces DMF, a new sensor management framework that minimizes sensor deployment and energy consumption by exploiting data correlations, shifting processing to the cloud.

Findings

Effective reduction in sensor count while maintaining accuracy.

Significant energy and bandwidth savings demonstrated.

Scalable management of urban IoT networks achieved.

Abstract

The development and operation of smart cities relyheavily on large-scale Internet-of-Things (IoT) networks and sensor infrastructures that continuously monitor various aspects of urban environments. These networks generate vast amounts of data, posing challenges related to bandwidth usage, energy consumption, and system scalability. This paper introduces a novel sensing paradigm called Data-driven Modality Fusion (DMF), designed to enhance the efficiency of smart city IoT network management. By leveraging correlations between timeseries data from different sensing modalities, the proposed DMF approach reduces the number of physical sensors required for monitoring, thereby minimizing energy expenditure, communication bandwidth, and overall deployment costs. The framework relocates computational complexity from the edge devices to the core, ensuring that resource-constrained IoT devices are not burdened with intensive processing tasks. DMF is validated using data from a real-world IoT deployment in Madrid, demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed system in accurately estimating traffic, environmental, and pollution metrics from a reduced set of sensors. The proposed solution offers a scalable, efficient mechanism for managing urban IoT networks, while addressing issues of sensor failure and privacy concerns.