@migo: A Comprehensive Middleware Solution for Participatory Sensing Applications

Abstract

In the participatory sensing model, humans may serve as opportunistic sensors and flexible actuators while also consuming sensing services. Integrating humans into sensing systems has the potential to increase scale and reduce costs. However, contemporary participatory sensing software provides poor consideration of user dynamism, which includes: mobility across networks, mobility across devices and context-awareness. To address these limitations we propose the User Component and User Bindings. The former represents the user as a first class reconfigurable element of evolving and shared participatory sensing platforms. The latter allows the middleware to support multiple communications channels including Online Social Networks (OSN) to connect users with sensing applications. Our approach increases user participation, reduces out-of-context interactions and only consumes a limited amount of energy by sharing context information between applications. We support these claims by evaluating our approach on a two weeks experiment in which three participants take part in three concurrent participatory applications.