CoMon: cooperative ambience monitoring platform with continuity and benefit awareness

Mobile applications that sense continuously, such as location monitoring, are emerging. Despite their usefulness, their adoption in real-world deployment situations has been extremely slow. Many smartphone users are turned away by the drastic battery drain caused by continuous sensing and processing. Also, the extractable contexts from the phone are quite limited due to its position and sensing modalities. In this paper, we propose CoMon, a novel cooperative ambience monitoring platform, which newly addresses the energy problem through opportunistic cooperation among nearby mobile users. To maximize the benefit of cooperation, we develop two key techniques, (1) continuity-aware cooperator detection and (2) benefit-aware negotiation. The former employs heuristics to detect cooperators who will remain in the vicinity for a long period of time, while the latter automatically devises a cooperation plan that provides mutual benefit to cooperators, while considering running applications, available devices, and user policies. Through continuity- and benefit-aware operation, CoMon enables applications to monitor the environment at much lower energy consumption. We implement and deploy a CoMon prototype and show that it provides significant benefit for mobile sensing applications.