Mobile Crowdsensing

Mobile sensor systems such as smart phones and vehicular systems represent a new type of infrastructure as an alternative to energy constrained sensors of static sensor networks. Smart phones and vehicular systems can support more complex computations, have significant memory and storage, and offer direct access to the Internet. Therefore, mobile people-centric sensing can be a scalable and cost-effective alternative to deploying static wireless sensor networks for dense sensing coverage across large areas. This book explores mobile crowd sensing systems and their protocols, current uses of mobile sensing, advantages of collective sensing, and examples of crowdsourcing applications.

Mobile crowdsensing is a technology that allows large scale, cost-effective sensing of the physical world. In mobile crowdsensing, mobile personal devices such as smart phones or smart watches come equipped with a variety of sensors that can be leveraged to collect data related to environment, transportation, healthcare, safety and so on. This book presents the first extensive coverage of mobile crowdsensing, with examples and insights drawn from the authors’ extensive research on this topic as well as from the research and development of a growing community of researchers and practitioners working in this emerging field. Throughout the text, the authors provide the reader with various examples of crowdsensing applications and the building blocks to creating the necessary infrastructure, explore the related concepts of mobile sensing and crowdsourcing, and examine security and privacy issues introduced by mobile crowdsensing platforms.

• Provides a comprehensive description of mobile crowdsensing, a one-stop shop for all relevant issues pertaining to mobile crowdsensing, including motivation, applications, design and implementation, incentive mechanisms, and reliability and privacy.
• Describes the design and implementations of mobile crowdsensing platforms of great interest for the readers working in research and industry to quickly implement and test their systems.
• Identifies potential issues in building such mobile crowdsensing applications to ensure their usability in real life and presents future directions in mobile crowdsensing by emphasizing the open problems that have to be addressed.