Resource Management for Public Sensing

Public sensing is a new research area in the fields of wireless sensor networks and mobile computing. It leverages the mobile sensors and system resources readily available in mobile phones to execute sensing tasks. In order to plan, execute and adapt large-scale sensing tasks, applications need to query for the available resources, e.g. the density of certain sensors. We investigate how such information can be provided, and we propose a resource manager for public sensing. Our primary goal is to minimize the energy consumed by the mobile devices to make public sensing feasible without disturbing users. We propose a cluster-based protocol for collecting local views of the resource state using local ad-hoc communication since this is much more energy-efficient than long-range (e.g. cellular) communication. We compare our solution to a standard approach where mobile devices communicate their resource states using the cellular phone network. We show that 65% of the energy is saved and the communication load on the infrastructure is reduced by 90% while an average delivery ratio of 93% is retained.