Cyber Physical Sensors and Actuators for Privacy-and Cost-Aware Optimization of User-Generated Content Provisioning

Nowadays there is growing interest in evolving the distributed sensors concept from the more traditional one of enabling technology to monitor the surrounding physical environment towards Cyber Physical Systems (CPS) sensors and actuators, that is, as a suitable tool to measure/influence the cyber activity of possibly worldwide communities of users (e.g., any geotagged operation leaving a cyber footprint and any cyber physical incentive to stimulate activity as in crowdsensing). To leverage this novel perspective, we propose a framework to integrate at best multilayer CPS sensors and actuators as the basis for autonomic management operations on both physical and cyber worlds. In this paper the specific application domain target is peer-to-peer content sharing based on social identities and relationships, but we claim that the proposed CPS framework is of general applicability. In particular, our original middleware solution adopts CPS actuators to move users' content temporarily from smart home environments to high-performance cloud resources to minimize the access time of a dynamically selected quota of contents. Then, based on social network sensors and connectivity/networking ones hosted at lightweight domestic Web servers, our CPS actuators can originally and dynamically move content back from the cloud to smart homes when appropriate, in order to both retain full ownership of user-generated content and reduce cloud hosting costs.