CSSWare: A Middleware for Scalable Mobile Crowd-Sourced Services

The growing ubiquity of a variety of personal connected computational devices - each with a number of sensors - has created the opportunity for a wide range of crowd-sourced services. A busy professional could find a restaurant to go to for a quick lunch based on information available from smartphones of other people already there. Sensors on smartphones could detect whether their owners are having lunch, waiting to be seated, or even heading there. Although the programming required for offering a new service of this sort can be significant if done from scratch, we identify core communication mechanisms underlying such services, which can be implemented as part of a middleware. Service designers can then launch novel services over this middleware by plugging in small pieces of service-specific code. This paper describes the multi-origin communication mechanism which we believe to underlie many crowd-sourced services. It presents our design and prototype Actor-based implementation of middleware for crowd-sourced services, CSSWare. We present the code for a realistic crowd-sourced service to illustrate the ease with which new services can be specified and launched. Finally, we present our experimental results demonstrating scalability, performance and data-contributor side energy efficiency of the approach.