Wireless sensor deployment for collaborative sensing with mobile phones

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks have been widely deployed to perform sensing constantly at specific locations, but their energy consumption and deployment cost are of great concern. With the popularity and advanced technologies of mobile phones, participatory urban sensing is a rising and promising field which utilizes mobile phones as mobile sensors to collect data, though it is hard to guarantee the sensing quality and availability under the dynamic behaviors and mobility of human beings. Based on the above observations, we suggest that wireless sensors and mobile phones can complement each other to perform collaborative sensing efficiently with satisfactory quality and availability. In this paper, a novel collaborative sensing paradigm which integrates and supports wireless sensors and mobile phones with different communication standards is designed. We propose a seamless integrated framework which minimizes the number of wireless sensors deployed, while providing high sensing quality and availability to satisfy the application requirements. The dynamic sensing behaviors and mobility of mobile phone participants make it extremely challenging to estimate their sensing quality and availability, so as to deploy the wireless sensors at the optimal locations to guarantee the sensing performance at a minimum cost. We introduce two mathematical models, a sensing quality evaluation model and a mobility prediction model, to predict the sensing quality and mobility of the mobile phone participants. We further propose a cost-effective sensor deployment algorithm to guarantee the required coverage probability and sensing quality for the system. Extensive simulations with real mobile traces demonstrate that the proposed paradigm can integrate wireless sensors and mobile phones seamlessly for satisfactory sensing quality and availability with minimized number of sensors. © 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.