Sensor Mobile Enablement (SME): A light-weight standard for opportunistic sensing services

Abstract

The proliferation of smartphones as complex sensing systems represents today the basis to further stimulate the active participation of mobile users in opportunistic sensing services. However, single sensing devices (either independent network components or integrated in more powerful devices) generally present different capabilities and implement proprietary standards. This highlights the necessity of defining a common standard for sensing data encoding in order to guarantee the interoperability of heterogeneous devices and personal mobile systems. In this paper we present Sensor Mobile Enablement (SME), a lightweight standard for efficiently identifying, coding and decoding heterogeneous sensing information on mobile devices. After a detailed analysis of SME features and advantages, we present its performances derived from real experiments on Android smartphones. Results highlight that SME does not heavily impact on mobile system's performances while efficiently supporting opportunistic sensing services.