Sentio: Distributed Sensor Virtualization for Mobile Apps

This paper presents Sentio, a distributed middleware designed to provide mobile apps with seamless connectivity to remote sensors when the sensing code and the sensors are not physically on the same device, e.g., when the sensing code is offloaded to the cloud. Sentio presents the apps with virtual sensors that are mapped to remote physical sensors. Virtual sensors can be composed into higher-level sensors, which fuse sensing data from multiple physical sensors. Furthermore, they are mapped to the best available physical sensors when the app starts and re-mapped transparently to other physical sensors at runtime in response to context changes. Sentio was designed to work without modifications to the operating system and to provide low-latency access to remote sensors, which is beneficial to apps with real time-requirements such as mobile games. We have built a prototype of Sentio on Android. We have also developed four apps based on Sentio to understand the programming effort and evaluate the performance. The development of the apps shows that complex sensing tasks can be implemented quickly, benefiting from Sentio’s high-level API. The experimental results show that Sentio achieves good real-time performance.