Distributed Crowd-sensing Infrastructure for Personalized Dynamic IoT Spaces

In this paper, we describe a distributed crowd-sensing infrastructure that integrates and bridges small scale personalized ad-hoc Internet of Things (IoT) spaces (consisting of personal interconnected smart devices, sensors and actuators dynamically deployed at runtime) to large scale IoT spaces. While a lot of innovation takes place on large scale IoT infrastructures, we focus on a personalized IoT infrastructure that allows user level control and management of personally owned IoT resources. Our approach uses a peer to peer (P2P) network together with distributed discovery- and directory-services, without the need for centralized infrastructure. The contribution of this paper is twofold: Firstly, we present an Android-based solution called Ambient Bridge that exposes a user-selected subset of the build-in sensors and actuators of a smart device as CoAP (Constrained Application Protocol) web services. Moreover, it is used to dynamically integrate external sensors and actuators at runtime that are normally only accessible via proprietary or non-networked interfaces. Secondly, we present a directory service and distributed semantic search engine called the Smart Service Proxy (SSP). The SSP allows application developers to search for sensors and actuators using SPARQL queries, which are automatically distributed between and processed by the cooperating SSPs.