  The Internet of Things (IoT) is part of the Internet of the future and will
comprise billions of intelligent communicating "things" or Internet Connected
Objects (ICO) which will have sensing, actuating, and data processing
capabilities. Each ICO will have one or more embedded sensors that will capture
potentially enormous amounts of data. The sensors and related data streams can
be clustered physically or virtually, which raises the challenge of searching
and selecting the right sensors for a query in an efficient and effective way.
This paper proposes a context-aware sensor search, selection and ranking model,
called CASSARAM, to address the challenge of efficiently selecting a subset of
relevant sensors out of a large set of sensors with similar functionality and
capabilities. CASSARAM takes into account user preferences and considers a
broad range of sensor characteristics, such as reliability, accuracy, location,
battery life, and many more. The paper highlights the importance of sensor
search, selection and ranking for the IoT, identifies important characteristics
of both sensors and data capture processes, and discusses how semantic and
quantitative reasoning can be combined together. This work also addresses
challenges such as efficient distributed sensor search and
relational-expression based filtering. CASSARAM testing and performance
evaluation results are presented and discussed.
