Opportunistic Sharing of Continuous Mobile Sensing Data for Energy and Power Conservation

Smartphones and a growing number of wearable devices are equipped with powerful sensors. This has led to increased interest in developing applications using sensor feeds from such devices to offer services across a wide variety of domains including healthcare, entertainment, environmental monitoring and transportation. However, most of these applications require continuous sensing, which places a heavy demand on the typically limited battery power of devices. This paper presents ShareSens, our approach to opportunistically merge sensing requirements of independent applications. We achieve this using sensing schedulers for sensors, which determine the lowest sensing rate which would satisfy all requests, and then use custom filters to send out only the required data to each application. Applications can request fixed sampling rates or ranges of rates, creating the opportunity for sending them higher rates than minimally required for free Sensing requests made through our ShareSens API are forwarded to the relevant schedulers, which determine the optimum sensing rates to satisfy all requests, and set up filters to deliver required feeds to the applications. The design and implementation of ShareSens is presented, along with results from our experimental work on the power savings that can be achieved by using it.