The vision of theInternet of Things (IoT)is coming closer to reality as a large number of embedded devices are introduced to our everyday environments. For many commercial IoT devices, ubiquitously connected mobile platforms can provide global connectivity and enable various applications. Nevertheless, the types of IoT resource-utilizing applications are still limited due to the traditional stovepipe software architecture, where the vendors provide supporting software on an end-to-end basis. This paper tries to address this issue by introducing theSensor Virtualization Module (SVM), which provides a software abstraction for external IoT objects and allows applications to easily utilize various IoT resources through open APIs. We implement the SVM on both Android and iOS and show that the SVM architecture can lead to easy development of applications. We envision that this simplification in application development will catalyze the development of various IoT services.
By interacting with external sensors, smartphones can gather high-fidelity data on the surrounding environment to develop various environment-aware, personalized applications. In this work we introduce the sensor virtualization module (SVM) which virtualizes external sensors so that smartphone applications can easily utilize a large number of sensing resources. Implemented on the Android platform, our SVM simplifies the management of external sensors by abstracting them as virtual sensors to provide the capability of resolving conflicting data requests from multiple applications and also mashing-up sensing data from different sensors to create new customized sensors. We envision our SVM to open the possibilities of designing novel personalized smartphone applications.
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