MobiSense — mobile network services for coordinated participatory sensing

Cellular and Wi-Fi networks now form a global substrate that provides billions of mobile phone users with consistent, location-aware communication and multimedia data access. On this substrate is emerging a new class of mobile phone applications that use the phones location, image and acoustic sensors, and enable people to choose what to sense and when to share data about themselves and their surroundings. Peoples' natural movement through and among living, work, and “third” spaces, provides spatial and temporal coverage for these modalities, the character of which is impossible to achieve through embedded instrumentation alone. This paper proposes a network service architecture for participatory sensing, describing challenges in (1) network coordination services enabling applications to efficiently select, incentivize and task mobile users based on measures of coverage, capabilities and interests; (2) attestation mechanisms to enable data consumers to assign trust to the data they access; and (3) participatory privacy regulation mechanisms used by data contributors to control what data they share.