Towards a Monitoring System for High Altitude Objects
Abstract :
High Altitude Objects (HAO), typically sounding balloons, are mobile objects that gather information (e.g. weather data) during their trip and send it to base stations using wireless communication. Once launched, these objects need to be tracked and recovered, and ideally monitored to exploit data in real-time. This paper discusses about middleware and embedded system concerns when monitoring such objects. The architecture that is presented in the following relies on both a monitoring middleware based on a modified RFID suite (part of the OW2 Aspire project, primarily targeting the management of objects in an Internet of Things for RFID-based and sensor-based applications), and on an embedded system (part of the HAO) with multimodal communication capabilities. This approach has been validated by two experiments consisting in a real time monitoring of a sounding balloon. The whole application is generic enough to be used to track and monitor other kinds of mobile objects, including sounding rockets and Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs)
KeyWords :
Sounding balloons, Tracking, RFID, Sensors, EPC Global 
