Quality of Information in Mobile Crowdsensing

Abstract

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. F. Restuccia et al.Not only are today's smartphones ubiquitous devices, they are also equipped with a plethora of embedded multi-modal sensors; integrate wireless communication technologies such as 4G/WiFi Internet connectivity, and possess complex processing capabilities. For example, the cameras on smartphones can be used as video and image sensors [29], the microphone can be used as an acoustic sensor [39,154,206], and the embedded global positioning system (GPS) receiver can be used to gather accurate location information, while gyroscopes, accelerometers, and proximity sensors can be used to extract contextual information about the users, such as driving or walking states [75,122]. Further, additional sensors can be easily interfaced with smartphones via Bluetooth or wired connections, such as temperature, air quality, and humidity [69,168].These technological features, combined with the advanced sensing capability of humans, has spurred a significant amount of research from both academia and industry, which together have proposed over the last 10 years a myriad of applications based on the emerging mobile crowdsensing paradigm 1 . Mobile crowdsensing empowers ordinary citizens (or users 2 ) with the capability to actively monitor various phenomena pertaining to themselves (e.g., health, social connections) or their community (e.g., environment). This rich information or inference about themselves or the community may also be sent back to the participating or other concerned users to improve their life experiences, thus influencing their choices. Real-life applications, which can take advantage of both low-level sensor data and high-level user activities, range from real-time traffic monitoring applications, to environmental pollution monitoring, crime monitoring, and social networking, just to name a few. For a survey on mobile crowdsensin...

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