The human element as the key enabler of pervasiveness

The recent proliferation of sensor-equipped smartphones has brought sensor networking to the general public in the form of mobile phone sensing. By reaching out to mainstream users, mobile phone sensing has the potential of achieving the pervasive computing vision by putting the human element in the foreground. Because mobile phone sensing may require computationally intensive applications, it is impractical and inefficient to stick to local processing. On the other hand, the emerging trend of offloading expensive tasks to the mobile computing cloud has a significant energy footprint and suffers from the drawbacks of extreme centralization. Opportunistic computing provides an appealing alternative to the mobile computing cloud by allowing devices to join forces and leverage heterogeneous resources from other devices. Because this is only possible by leveraging human mobility, opportunistic computing adds even more prominence to the role of the human element, which is already central to mobile phone sensing and now becomes the key enabler of pervasiveness.