The MetroNet project will consist of sensors deployed in the storefront windows of downtown Charlottesville. The sensors will count people as they pass by a store or walk into a store, in order to provide empirical data to the shopkeepers about the effects of advertising, window displays, weather, etc. on pedestrian business.

The goal of MetroNet is to provide an exercise in data sharing; if the shopkeepers are willing to share data, it could be used by pedestrians to see the popularity of a particular concert, by other shopkeepers to calibrate their own data, by city planners to estimate the effects of vehicular traffic on the downtown mall, by real estate customers to estimate the value of individual properties, etc. The key to MetroNet will be to provide the framework necessary to (i) provide incentives to shopkeepers for data sharing (ii) make it easy for shopkeepers to share data, and (iii) provide privacy mechanisms for sharing only aspects of the data.

The Metronet testing server has preliminary functionality for publishing, managing, and sharing sensor data.

The InsideUVA newspaper and the Daily Progress have written articles about MetroNet.

This project is currently funded by Microsoft Research

Robert Dickerson, Jiakang Lu, Jian Lu, and Kamin Whitehouse. Stream Feeds - An Abstraction for the World Wide Sensor Web. Conference on the Internet of Things (IOT) 2008. March 26-28. Zurich, Switzerland.