Distributed mobile CEP for collaborative social computing

Smartphones have become highly personalized interfaces between people and the technology ecosystem around them. In this sense, they play a key role for a technology shift from the current Internet of Things to a future human-centric paradigm of an Internet of People, automatically adapting smart things and services to the preferences and context of their users. In this paper, we propose the use of Complex Event Processing (CEP) engines deployed in the users’ smartphones granting them context-awareness capabilities in order to react to external stimulus, and enabling them to interact both with smart things and services in the surroundings of the users. With that purpose, we have designed a communication architecture that interconnects CEP engines running on smartphones, providing a framework for building applications for Mobile-based Collaborative Social Computing (MCSC). For that, we make use of previous works of the authors with Digital Avatars, a framework which promotes the use of smartphones for inferring and sharing a unique digital avatar or virtual profile of each user. The resulting framework, which we have called Collaborative CEP, allows to implement complex interactions among users, and between them and the IoT, a common need in Collaborative Social Computing applications. We provide a proof of concept based on the implementation of a Cops and Robbers game to test the expressiveness and correct functioning of the framework, and we evaluate its performance and efficiency.