Mobiles for Sensing Clouds: the SAaaS4Mobile Experience

Smart devices, and mobiles in particular, are at the forefront of several hot new trends in ICT, such as the Internet of Things and service computing. Cloud computing is another paradigm generating a great deal of offshoots, some of which are aimed at enabling novel services and applications by exploiting its ubiquity and flexibility in combination with sensors and the (meta)data they produce about phenomena, events and other interesting items about the physical world. In this context, the authors, propose a new way to orchestrate devices, in particular SNs and mobiles, as resources to build up Clouds of sensors, reverting the current wisdom about mobile Clouds, i.e. the integration of feature-rich devices into the Cloud fabric as mere clients to one where personal / wearable devices are actively involved into a “sensing” Cloud, forming a fully feedback-enabled ecosystem. The main aim of the Sensing and Actuation as a Service (SAaaS) approach is therefore to implement such a Cloud by enrolling and aggregating sensing resources from sensor networks and personal, mobile devices. A device-centric approach is embraced as in IaaS Clouds: once collected, the physical (sensing) resources are abstracted and virtualised and then provided elastically, on-demand, as a service to end users, including facilities for customization of the (hosting) embedded platform. A key point of the SAaaS approach is the abstraction of resources, i.e. providing a uniform way to access to and interact with the underlying physical nodes. In this paper we focus on the low-level interaction with sensing resources in SAaaS, restricting the scope to mobiles, thus providing details on theoretical and design aspects as well as technical and implementation ones. In particular, we report on an implementation of the SAaaS low-level modules on Android devices, the SAaaS4Mobile one, providing architectural descriptions of the main modules, implementation guidelines and discussing through a preliminary implementation evaluation the effectiveness of the approach.