Quality of Information in Mobile Crowdsensing: Survey and Research Challenges

Smartphones have become the most pervasive devices in people's lives, and are clearly transforming the way we live and perceive technology. Today's smartphones benefit from almost ubiquitous Internet connectivity and come equipped with a plethora of inexpensive yet powerful embedded sensors, such as accelerometer, gyroscope, microphone, and camera. This unique combination has enabled revolutionary applications based on the mobile crowdsensing paradigm, such as real-time road traffic monitoring, air and noise pollution, crime control, and wildlife monitoring, just to name a few. Differently from prior sensing paradigms, humans are now the primary actors of the sensing process, since they become fundamental in retrieving reliable and up-to-date information about the event being monitored. As humans may behave unreliably or maliciously, assessing and guaranteeing Quality of Information (QoI) becomes more important than ever. In this paper, we provide a new framework for defining and enforcing the QoI in mobile crowdsensing, and analyze in depth the current state-of-the-art on the topic. We also outline novel research challenges, along with possible directions of future work.Comment: To appear in ACM Transactions on Sensor Networks (TOSN

Understanding citizen science and environmental monitoring: final report on behalf of UK Environmental Observation Framework

Citizen science can broadly be defined as the involvement of volunteers in science. Over the past decade there has been a rapid increase in the number of citizen science initiatives. The breadth of environmental-based citizen science is immense. Citizen scientists have surveyed for and monitored a broad range of taxa, and also contributed data on weather and habitats reflecting an increase in engagement with a diverse range of observational science. Citizen science has taken many varied approaches from citizen-led (co-created) projects with local community groups to, more commonly, scientist-led mass participation initiatives that are open to all sectors of society. Citizen science provides an indispensable means of combining environmental research with environmental education and wildlife recording. Here we provide a synthesis of extant citizen science projects using a novel cross-cutting approach to objectively assess understanding of citizen science and environmental monitoring including: 1. Brief overview of knowledge on the motivations of volunteers. 2. Semi-systematic review of environmental citizen science projects in order to understand the variety of extant citizen science projects. 3. Collation of detailed case studies on a selection of projects to complement the semi-systematic review. 4. Structured interviews with users of citizen science and environmental monitoring data focussing on policy, in order to more fully understand how citizen science can fit into policy needs. 5. Review of technology in citizen science and an exploration of future opportunities

Incentive mechanism design for citizen reporting application using Stackelberg game

The growing utilization of smartphones equipped with various sensors to collect and analyze information around us highlights a paradigm called mobile crowdsensing. To motivate citizens’ participation in crowdsensing and compensate them for their resources, it is necessary to incentivize the participants for their sensing service. There are several studies that used the Stackelberg game to model the incentive mechanism, however, those studies did not include a budget constraint for limited budget case. Another challenge is to optimize crowdsourcer (government) profit in conducting crowdsensing under the limited budget then allocates the budget to several regional working units that are responsible for the specific city problems. We propose an incentive mechanism for mobile crowdsensing based on several identified incentive parameters using the Stackelberg game model and applied the MOOP (multi-objective optimization problem) to the incentive model in which the participant reputation is taken into account. The evaluation of the proposed incentive model is performed through simulations. The simulation indicated that the result appropriately corresponds to the theoretical properties of the model

Crowd-based cognitive perception of the physical world: Towards the internet of senses

This paper introduces a possible architecture and discusses the research directions for the realization of the Cognitive Perceptual Internet (CPI), which is enabled by the convergence of wired and wireless communications, traditional sensor networks, mobile crowd-sensing, and machine learning techniques. The CPI concept stems from the fact that mobile devices, such as smartphones and wearables, are becoming an outstanding mean for zero-effort world-sensing and digitalization thanks to their pervasive diffusion and the increasing number of embedded sensors. Data collected by such devices provide unprecedented insights into the physical world that can be inferred through cognitive processes, thus originating a digital sixth sense. In this paper, we describe how the Internet can behave like a sensing brain, thus evolving into the Internet of Senses, with network-based cognitive perception and action capabilities built upon mobile crowd-sensing mechanisms. The new concept of hyper-map is envisioned as an efficient geo-referenced repository of knowledge about the physical world. Such knowledge is acquired and augmented through heterogeneous sensors, multi-user cooperation and distributed learning mechanisms. Furthermore, we indicate the possibility to accommodate proactive sensors, in addition to common reactive sensors such as cameras, antennas, thermometers and inertial measurement units, by exploiting massive antenna arrays at millimeter-waves to enhance mobile terminals perception capabilities as well as the range of new applications. Finally, we distillate some insights about the challenges arising in the realization of the CPI, corroborated by preliminary results, and we depict a futuristic scenario where the proposed Internet of Senses becomes true

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

An Elastic Hybrid Sensing Platform: Architecture and Research Challenges

© 2016 Published by Elsevier B.V. The dynamic provisioning of hybrid sensing services that integrates both WSN and MPS is a promising, yet challenging concept. It does not only widen the spatial sensing coverage, but it also enables different types of sensing nodes to collaboratively perform sensing tasks and complement each other. Furthermore, it allows for the provisioning of a new category of services that was not possible to implement in pure WSN or MPS networks. Offering a hybrid sensing platform as a service results in several benefits including, but no limited to, efficient sharing and dynamic management of sensing nodes, diversification and reuse of sensing services, as well as combination of many sensing paradigms to enable data to be collected from different sources. However, many challenges need to be resolved before such architecture can be feasible. Currently, the deployment of sensing applications and services is a costly and complex process, which also lacks automation. This paper motivates the need for hybrid sensing, sketches an early architecture, and identifies the research issues with few hints on how to solve them. We argue that a sensing platform that reuses the virtualization and cloud computing concepts will help in addressing many of these challenges, and overcome the limitations of today\u27s deployment practices

Trust Evaluation Mechanism for User Recruitment in Mobile Crowd-Sensing in the Internet of Things

Mobile Crowd-Sensing (MCS) has appeared as a prospective solution for large-scale data collection, leveraging built-in sensors and social applications in mobile devices that enables a variety of Internet of Things (IoT) services. However, the human involvement in MCS results in a high possibility for unintentionally contributing corrupted and falsified data or intentionally spreading disinformation for malevolent purposes, consequently undermining IoT services. Therefore, recruiting trustworthy contributors plays a crucial role in collecting high quality data and providing better quality of services while minimizing the vulnerabilities and risks to MCS systems. In this article, a novel trust model called Experience-Reputation (E-R) is proposed for evaluating trust relationships between any two mobile device users in a MCS platform. To enable the E-R model, virtual interactions among the users are manipulated by considering an assessment of the quality of contributed data from such users. Based on these interactions, two indicators of trust called Experience and Reputation are calculated accordingly. By incorporating the Experience and Reputation trust indicators (TIs), trust relationships between the users are established, evaluated and maintained. Based on these trust relationships, a novel trust-based recruitment scheme is carried out for selecting the most trustworthy MCS users to contribute to data sensing tasks. In order to evaluate the performance and effectiveness of the proposed trust-based mechanism as well as the E-R trust model, we deploy several recruitment schemes in a MCS testbed which consists of both normal and malicious users. The results highlight the strength of the trust-based scheme as it delivers better quality for MCS services while being able to detect malicious users. We believe that the trust-based user recruitment offers an effective capability for selecting trustworthy users for various MCS systems and, importantly, the proposed mechanism is practical to deploy in the real world