CSSWare: An Actor-Based Middleware for Mobile Crowd-Sourced Services

The growing ubiquity of personal connected devices -- each with a number of sensors -- has created the opportunity for a wide range of crowd-sourced services. Although the programming required for offering new services can be significant if done from scratch, we identify core communication mechanisms underlying such services, and implement them in a middleware, CSSWare. Service designers can then launch novel services over CSSWare by simply plugging in small pieces of service-specific code. This paper describes the key multi-origin communication mechanism underlying many crowd-sourced services, presents our design and implementation of CSSWare, an actor-based middleware, and evaluates it programmability benefits and scalability.