Design Considerations for High Fan-In Systems: The HiFi Approach

Advances in data acquisition and sensor technologies are leading towards the development of "high fan-in" architectures: widely distributed systems whose edges consist of numerous receptors such as sensor networks, RFID readers, or probes, and whose interior nodes are traditional host computers organized using the principles of cascading streams and successive aggregation. Examples include RFID-enabled supply chain management, large- scale environmental monitoring, and various types of network and computing infrastructure monitoring. In this paper, we identify the key characteristics and data management challenges presented by high fan-in systems, and argue for a uniform, query-based approach towards addressing them. We then present our initial design concepts behind HiFi, the system we are building to embody these ideas, and describe a proof-of-concept prototype.