SOUL: An Edge-Cloud System for Mobile Applications in a Sensor-Rich World

With the Internet of Things, sensors are becoming ever more ubiquitous, but interacting with them continues to present numerous challenges, particularly for applications running on resource-constrained devices like smartphones. The SOUL abstractions in this paper address two issues faced by such applications: (1) access to sensors with the levels of convenience needed for their ubiquitous, dynamic use, and only by parties authorized to do so, and (2) scalability in sensor access, given today's multitude of sensors. Toward this end, SOUL, first, introduces a new abstraction for the applications to transparently and uniformly access both on-device and ambient sensors with associated actuators. Second, potentially expensive sensor-related processing needs not just occur on smartphones, but can also leverage edge-and remote-cloud resources. Finally, SOUL provides access control methods that permit users to easily define access permissions for sensors, which leverages users' social ties and captures the context in which access requests are made. SOUL demonstrates that the applications on Android platforms can scale the use of 100s of sensors with performance and energy efficiency.