An Adaptive Middleware for Opportunistic Mobile Sensing

The current ubiquity of smart phones with mobile Internet and several short-range wireless interfaces (NFC, Bluetooth, Bluetooth Smart) and the fact that these devices are carried almost anytime and anywhere by users, enables potentially new pervasive sensing applications where smartphones can act as universal hubs for interaction with sensors (or sensor networks) that have only short-range wireless connectivity. Thus, in next years we can expect an increasing number of long-term and large-scale deployments for various crowd-sourced monitoring applications, such as environment monitoring, domestic utility meter reading, urban monitoring, etc. In this paper, we present the implementation and initial performance results with our mobile-cloud middleware that enables such opportunistic mobile sensing. One of the singular features of our middleware is the capability to discover, dynamically download and install sensor-specific Transco ding modules on the mobile phone according to the encountered sensor type and make.