Service sharing in mobile sensing systems

Today´s modern mobile devices, (such as smart-phones and tablets) present great potential for growth of many novel, powerful, but also highly demanding applications. However, most mobile devices/users operate in isolation from one another, i.e., they are not aware of the presence of other devices in their proximity. There are numerous situations where proximity-awareness (i.e., a device is aware of other mobile devices in its neighborhood) could be used to support spontaneous sharing of resources and information, thereby enabling a variety of new application scenarios. This paper presents an architecture, called Spontaneous Information and Resource sharing InfrasTructure (SPIRIT), that allows mobile devices to create, discover, join, leave, and revoke the sharing of resources in an efficient and robust fashion. Built on top of a group communications layer for mobile devices, SPIRIT allows users or devices to express various heterogeneous services and service sharing paradigms using a novel subscription language. While the shared services can include various types of resources (e.g., network connections, CPU) and information (e.g., database entries), this paper´s focus is on sensor information, i.e., the information collected by the various sensors found in modern mobile devices (e.g., GPS, acceleration, light, pressure, sound, etc.).