Participatory sensing algorithms for mobile object discovery in urban areas

Abstract

\n This paper introduces mechanisms for the automated detection of\n mobile objects in urban areas. Widely available devices such as\n mobile phones with integrated proximity sensors such as RFID readers\n or Bluetooth cooperatively perform sensing operations to discover\n mobile objects. In this paper, we propose a coverage metric for\n assessing the completeness of sensing that considers spatial and\n temporal aspects. To maximize coverage while minimizing energy\n consumption of mobile nodes, we propose both a centralized and a\n distributed coordination algorithm for selecting nodes that need to\n sense. Moreover, we present strategies that allow selected nodes to\n perform efficient sense operations. By extensive simulations, we\n show that distributed coordination achieves drastic energy savings\n of up to 63%, while limiting the coverage loss to 13%. Moreover, we\n show that the centralized algorithm loses less than 1% coverage\n compared to the maximum possible coverage.\n