A hypervisor for infrastructure-enabled sensing Clouds

The lack of support and the shortcomings of Cloud computing in relation to pervasive applications can be addressed through the Sensing and Actuation as a Service (SAaaS) paradigm. In SAaaS, sensors and actuators, from both mobile devices and sensor networks, can be discovered, aggregated and elastically provided as a service according to the Cloud provisioning model. Nevertheless, managing a large set of sensing and actuation resources, characterized by volatility and heterogeneity, rises the need for specific mechanisms and strategies. In this paper we focus on management, abstraction and virtualization of sensing resources. More specifically, we describe the lowest level module of the SAaaS architecture, the hypervisor, that takes care of communication with devices and orchestrates their resources. The hypervisor operates according to policies and strategies coming from higher layers, and includes customization facilities that ease the integration of heterogeneous devices.