A Collaborative Mobile Sensing Framework using Mobile Cloud Computing

The ubiquity of mobile devices, tablets, wearables and other smart devices, with ever-more capable embedded sensors, has accelerated the use of mobile sensing applications. These applications harness the processed sensor data to offer a more context-aware and personalized user-experience for purposes including healthcare, entertainment, environmental monitoring and promoting socialization. However, the resource limitation of mobile devices creates a significant bottleneck for the realization of such applications. In this scenario, Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC) is a promising solution that allows the offload of raw or pre-processed sensed data to the application logic hosted in the cloud. This research utilizes the scalability and processing capabilities of MCC to present an intelligent framework that readily supports collaborative sensing and provides efficient collection of the sensed data, whilst conserving the energy of the mobile devices and meeting the performance constraints of applications. The benefits of this collaborative sensing framework include the capability to satisfy multiple mobile applications with optimal sensing using minimal number of mobile devices, context-driven reporting of sensed data to the application cloud, and achieving all of this in an energy efficient manner.