Self-Optimizing Citizen-Centric Mobile Urban Sensing Systems

In this paper, we develop a novel networking scheme that supports both real-time and delay-tolerant urban sensing applications. This maintains optimality through self-adapting its communications strategy using either inexpensive short-range opportunistic transmissions or reliable long-range cellular radios. Core to this scheme is the trading of mobile sensor data in a virtual market where we demonstrate that our scheme can incentivize phone users to participate. We show that the scheme can optimise network throughput while minimising total phone costs, in terms of 3G and battery costs.