The Origin and Trustworthiness of Data in Smart City Applications

Abstract

Mobile devices and their sensors facilitate the development of a large range of environment-sensing applications and systems. Crowd sensing is used to feed smart city applications with anonymous but still relevant data. The quality and success of smart city applications depend on several aspects of user involvement, such as data trust and information about data origin. However, with the anonymity and openness of crowd sensing, smart city applications are exposed to untrustworthy and malicious data that can lead to poor decisions. In this paper, we propose a cloud architecture for smart city applications that includes, as a core service, a reputation system for evaluating the trustworthiness of crowd sensing data. This service will run locally, as close to the crowd as possible, for example, on wireless local area network (WLAN) access points (AP). Additionally, data stored in the cloud is traceable by its origin information.