Energy Efficient Data Collection in Opportunistic Mobile Crowdsensing Architectures for Smart Cities

Smart cities employ latest information and communication technologies to enhance services for citizens. Sensing is essential to monitor current status of infrastructures and the environment. In Mobile Crowdsensing (MCS), citizens participate in the sensing process contributing data with their mobile devices such as smartphones, tablets and wearables. To be effective, MCS systems require a large number of users to contribute data. While several studies focus on developing efficient incentive mechanisms to foster user participation, data collection policies still require investigation. In this paper, we propose a novel distributed and energy-efficient framework for data collection in opportunistic MCS architectures. Opportunistic sensing systems require minimal intervention from the user side as sensing decisions are application- or device-driven. The proposed framework minimizes the cost of both sensing and reporting, while maximizing the utility of data collection and, as a result, the quality of contributed information. We evaluate performance of the framework with simulations, performed in a real urban environment and with a large number of participants. The simulation results verify cost-effectiveness of the framework and assess efficiency of the data generation process

Mobile crowd sensing architectural frameworks: A comprehensive survey

Mobile Crowd Sensing has emerged as a new sensing paradigm, efficiently exploiting human intelligence and mobility in conjunction with advanced capabilities and proliferation of mobile devices. In order for MCS applications to reach their full potentials, a number of research challenges should be sufficiently addressed. The aim of this paper is to survey representative mobile crowd sensing applications and frameworks proposed in related research literature, analyze their distinct features and discuss on their relative merits and weaknesses, highlighting also potential solutions, in order to take a step closer to the definition of a unified MCS architectural framework

Delivering IoT Services in Smart Cities and Environmental Monitoring through Collective Awareness, Mobile Crowdsensing and Open Data

The Internet of Things (IoT) is the paradigm that allows us to interact with the real world by means of networking-enabled devices and convert physical phenomena into valuable digital knowledge. Such a rapidly evolving field leveraged the explosion of a number of technologies, standards and platforms. Consequently, different IoT ecosystems behave as closed islands and do not interoperate with each other, thus the potential of the number of connected objects in the world is far from being totally unleashed. Typically, research efforts in tackling such challenge tend to propose a new IoT platforms or standards, however, such solutions find obstacles in keeping up the pace at which the field is evolving. Our work is different, in that it originates from the following observation: in use cases that depend on common phenomena such as Smart Cities or environmental monitoring a lot of useful data for applications is already in place somewhere or devices capable of collecting such data are already deployed. For such scenarios, we propose and study the use of Collective Awareness Paradigms (CAP), which offload data collection to a crowd of participants. We bring three main contributions: we study the feasibility of using Open Data coming from heterogeneous sources, focusing particularly on crowdsourced and user-contributed data that has the drawback of being incomplete and we then propose a State-of-the-Art algorith that automatically classifies raw crowdsourced sensor data; we design a data collection framework that uses Mobile Crowdsensing (MCS) and puts the participants and the stakeholders in a coordinated interaction together with a distributed data collection algorithm that prevents the users from collecting too much or too less data; (3) we design a Service Oriented Architecture that constitutes a unique interface to the raw data collected through CAPs through their aggregation into ad-hoc services, moreover, we provide a prototype implementation

Let Opportunistic Crowdsensors Work Together for Resource-efficient, Quality-aware Observations

International audienceOpportunistic crowdsensing empowers citizens carrying hand-held devices to sense physical phenomena of common interest at a large and fine-grained scale without requiring the citizens' active involvement. However, the resulting uncontrolled collection and upload of the massive amount of contributed raw data incur significant resource consumption, from the end device to the server, as well as challenge the quality of the collected observations. This paper tackles both challenges raised by opportunistic crowdsensing, that is, enabling the resource-efficient gathering of relevant observations. To achieve so, we introduce the BeTogether middleware fostering context-aware, collaborative crowdsensing at the edge so that co-located crowdsensors operating in the same context, group together to share the work load in a cost- and quality-effective way. We evaluate the proposed solution using an implementation-driven evaluation that leverages a dataset embedding nearly 1 million entries contributed by 550 crowdsensors over a year. Results show that BeTogether increases the quality of the collected data while reducing the overall resource cost compared to the cloud-centric approach

A Survey on Mobile Crowdsensing Systems: Challenges, Solutions, and Opportunities

Mobile crowdsensing (MCS) has gained significant attention in recent years and has become an appealing paradigm for urban sensing. For data collection, MCS systems rely on contribution from mobile devices of a large number of participants or a crowd. Smartphones, tablets, and wearable devices are deployed widely and already equipped with a rich set of sensors, making them an excellent source of information. Mobility and intelligence of humans guarantee higher coverage and better context awareness if compared to traditional sensor networks. At the same time, individuals may be reluctant to share data for privacy concerns. For this reason, MCS frameworks are specifically designed to include incentive mechanisms and address privacy concerns. Despite the growing interest in the research community, MCS solutions need a deeper investigation and categorization on many aspects that span from sensing and communication to system management and data storage. In this paper, we take the research on MCS a step further by presenting a survey on existing works in the domain and propose a detailed taxonomy to shed light on the current landscape and classify applications, methodologies, and architectures. Our objective is not only to analyze and consolidate past research but also to outline potential future research directions and synergies with other research areas

Mobile Crowd Sensing in Edge Computing Environment

abstract: The mobile crowdsensing (MCS) applications leverage the user data to derive useful information by data-driven evaluation of innovative user contexts and gathering of information at a high data rate. Such access to context-rich data can potentially enable computationally intensive crowd-sourcing applications such as tracking a missing person or capturing a highlight video of an event. Using snippets and pictures captured from multiple mobile phone cameras with specific contexts can improve the data acquired in such applications. These MCS applications require efficient processing and analysis to generate results in real time. A human user, mobile device and their interactions cause a change in context on the mobile device affecting the quality contextual data that is gathered. Usage of MCS data in real-time mobile applications is challenging due to the complex inter-relationship between: a) availability of context, context is available with the mobile phones and not with the cloud, b) cost of data transfer to remote cloud servers, both in terms of communication time and energy, and c) availability of local computational resources on the mobile phone, computation may lead to rapid battery drain or increased response time. The resource-constrained mobile devices need to offload some of their computation. This thesis proposes ContextAiDe an end-end architecture for data-driven distributed applications aware of human mobile interactions using Edge computing. Edge processing supports real-time applications by reducing communication costs. The goal is to optimize the quality and the cost of acquiring the data using a) modeling and prediction of mobile user contexts, b) efficient strategies of scheduling application tasks on heterogeneous devices including multi-core devices such as GPU c) power-aware scheduling of virtual machine (VM) applications in cloud infrastructure e.g. elastic VMs. ContextAiDe middleware is integrated into the mobile application via Android API. The evaluation consists of overheads and costs analysis in the scenario of ``perpetrator tracking" application on the cloud, fog servers, and mobile devices. LifeMap data sets containing actual sensor data traces from mobile devices are used to simulate the application run for large scale evaluation.Dissertation/ThesisDoctoral Dissertation Electrical Engineering 201

Edge Intelligence : Empowering Intelligence to the Edge of Network

Edge intelligence refers to a set of connected systems and devices for data collection, caching, processing, and analysis proximity to where data are captured based on artificial intelligence. Edge intelligence aims at enhancing data processing and protects the privacy and security of the data and users. Although recently emerged, spanning the period from 2011 to now, this field of research has shown explosive growth over the past five years. In this article, we present a thorough and comprehensive survey of the literature surrounding edge intelligence. We first identify four fundamental components of edge intelligence, i.e., edge caching, edge training, edge inference, and edge offloading based on theoretical and practical results pertaining to proposed and deployed systems. We then aim for a systematic classification of the state of the solutions by examining research results and observations for each of the four components and present a taxonomy that includes practical problems, adopted techniques, and application goals. For each category, we elaborate, compare, and analyze the literature from the perspectives of adopted techniques, objectives, performance, advantages and drawbacks, and so on. This article provides a comprehensive survey of edge intelligence and its application areas. In addition, we summarize the development of the emerging research fields and the current state of the art and discuss the important open issues and possible theoretical and technical directions.Peer reviewe