Grant: Research Tools and Instruments - Category 1 (<$150,000)

The proposed equipment support the research program "Querying and Managing Heterogeneous and Evolving Distributed Data Sources".  The research program studies robust integration of heterogeneous and evolving databases and data streams.  Our emphasis is on resilient applications which can adapt to changes in remote data sources without manual intervention.  The research program also studies autonomous storage and exchange of heterogeneous data and data streams.  The objective is to achieve tuning of data storage and data exchange based on query workload, storage capabilities and structural analysis of the data set or data streams.   We propose to build a flexible testbed environment which hosts a rich set of data sets and data streams distributedly.  A main testbed server, that has sufficient computing and storage resource, will simulate a distributed database system consisting of data sets ranging from relational data warehouse to extensible markup language (XML)  repositories to web services and web applications.  A sensor edge server with lesser resource will manage streamed data from external wireless sensor networks and radio frequency identification (RFID) devices.  A key feature of our testbed is the sensor and RFID technology component.  We propose to include wireless sensors, active and passive RFID technology as part of the testbed so we are able to experiment with realistic data streams generated by sensor base stations and RFID readers.