Extensible data streams dispatching tool for Android

Abstract

Nowadays, the global market offers an enormous variety of external sensors and measuring instruments. In combination with increasingly more powerful mobile devices, it is possible to create new tools which expand their utility area. Use of different sensors on mobile devices is facilitated by a common standard, hiding all technical details and low-level protocols. In that way, the applications can collect data from several sensors without prior knowledge about the technical details of different sensors. However, each application still has to discover installed sensors, handle connection with each sensor separately and manage their state. In this thesis, we simplify the collection of data from different sensors. We focus on design and implementation of an extensible tool for Android operating system. This allows modulated sensor support to be linked together and expose a common interface which provides available data types from installed sensors. Our solution executes all tasks related to data packets dispatching with wide customization possibilities. The analysis applications and sensor support are separated by a common module. This module discovers all available sensor supports, provides a common sensor register to analysis applications, manages sensor supports and transfers data at the selected speed to the proper receiver. Several experiments are performed to show that the implementation of the module is stable, resilient and suited for data dispatching during a long period. The performance experiments show that data stream dispatching module is able to dispatch data packets at very high frequencies. Unfortunately, when the number of binders used to communicate with clients increases, the throughput is reduced due to a global lock used in the implementation of the binder.