Abstraction of On-Board Resources in Mobiles: SAaaS4Mobile, a First Step towards a Sensing Cloud

Through the Sensing and Actuation as a Service (SAaaS) we aim at implementing a sensing Cloud by enrolling and aggregating sensing resources from sensor networks and personal, mobile devices. We follow a device-driven approach, as adopted in IaaS Clouds: once collected, the physical (sensing) resources are abstracted and virtualised and then provided as a service to end users. A key point of the SAaaS 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 sensing resource abstraction in SAaaS, providing details on theoretical and design aspects as well as on technical and implementation ones. In particular, an implementation of the SAaaS abstraction layers for mobiles (SAaaS4mobile) is reported, giving adequate architectural descriptions of the main SAaaS4mobile modules and detailing the actual implementation of such modules for Android-powered mobiles.