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

in IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorials (2019), 21(3, thirdquarter 2019), 2419-2465

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 ... [more ▼]

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. [less ▲]

CrowdSenSim: a Simulation Platform for Mobile Crowdsensing in Realistic Urban Environments

in IEEE Access (2017)

Smart cities take advantage of recent ICT developments to provide added value to existing public services and improve quality of life for the citizens. The Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm makes the ... [more ▼]

Smart cities take advantage of recent ICT developments to provide added value to existing public services and improve quality of life for the citizens. The Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm makes the Internet more pervasive where objects equipped with computing, storage and sensing capabilities are interconnected with communication technologies. Because of the widespread diffusion of IoT devices, applying the IoT paradigm to smart cities is an excellent solution to build sustainable Information and Communication Technology (ICT) platforms. Having citizens involved in the process through mobile crowdsensing (MCS) techniques augments capabilities of these ICT platforms without additional costs. For proper operation, MCS systems require the contribution from a large number of participants. Simulations are therefore a candidate tool to assess the performance of MCS systems. In this paper, we illustrate the design of CrowdSenSim, a simulator for mobile crowdsensing. CrowdSenSim is designed specifically for realistic urban environments and smart cities services. We demonstrate the effectiveness of CrowdSenSim for the most popular MCS sensing paradigms (participatory and opportunistic) and we present its applicability using a smart public street lighting scenario. [less ▲]

Game-Theoretic Recruitment of Sensing Service Providers for Trustworthy Cloud-Centric Internet-of-Things (IoT) Applications

in IEEE Global Communications Conference (GLOBECOM) Workshops: Fifth International Workshop on Cloud Computing Systems, Networks, and Applications (CCSNA) (2016, December)

Widespread use of connected smart devices that are equipped with various built-in sensors has introduced the mobile crowdsensing concept to the IoT-driven information and communication applications ... [more ▼]

Widespread use of connected smart devices that are equipped with various built-in sensors has introduced the mobile crowdsensing concept to the IoT-driven information and communication applications. Mobile crowdsensing requires implicit collaboration between the crowdsourcer/recruiter platforms and users. Additionally, users need to be incentivized by the crowdsensing platform because each party aims to maximize their utility. Due to the participatory nature of data collection, trustworthiness and truthfulness pose a grand challenge in crowdsensing systems in the presence of malicious users, who either aim to manipulate sensed data or collaborate unfaithfully with the motivation of maximizing their income. In this paper, we propose a game-theoretic approach for trustworthiness-driven user recruitment in mobile crowdsensing systems that consists of three phases: i) user recruitment, ii) collaborative decision making on trust scores, and iii) badge rewarding. Our proposed framework incentivizes the users through a sub-game perfect equilibrium (SPE) and gamification techniques. Through simulations, we show that the platform utility can be improved by up to the order of 50\% while the average user utility can be increased by at least 15\% when compared to fully-distributed and user-centric trustworthy crowdsensing. [less ▲]