Participatory Sensor Networks as Sensing Layers

International audienceParticipatory sensor networks (PSNs) regards smartphone users as consumers as well as active producers of data. A sensing layer represents a type of data, coming from a given source of data, such as web services, traditional wireless sensor networks, and PSNs. In this work, we show the usefulness and potential of having sensing layers in PSNs. We also show how we can formalize the concept of sensing layers in participatory sensor networks. Furthermore, we demonstrate how to derive and create new applications and services that are not promptly available from different sensing layers, opening up very interesting research opportunities

Traffic Condition Is More Than Colored Lines on a Map: Characterization of Waze Alerts

International audienceParticipatory sensor network (PSN) enables the understanding of city dynamics and the urban behavioral patterns of their inhabitants. In this work, we focus our analysis on a specific PSN, derived from Waze, for sensing traffic con-ditions. Our objective is to characterize the properties of this PSN, its broad and global spatial coverage as well as its limitations. We also bring discussions on dif-ferent opportunities for application design using this network. We claim that the PSN derived from Waze has the potential to help us in the better understanding of traffic problem reasons. Besides that, it could be useful for improving algorithms used in navigation services: (1) by exploiting the provided real-time traffic in-formation or (2) by helping in the identification of valuable pieces of information that are hard to detect with traditional sensors, such as car accidents and potholes