On the Provisioning of Vehicle-Based Public Sensing Services

Abstract

Thanks to their abundant on-board resources, ubiquity, and mobility, smart vehicles can be considered major candidates for providing pervasive information services. With the diversity of in-vehicle sensors along with abundant storage, processing, and communication capabilities, smart vehicles can bring a wide scope of applications into action under the public sensing paradigm outstripping other candidate mobile resources such as smartphones. In this paper, we propose the vehicular public sensing (VPS) platform that aims at utilizing the abundant resources of smart vehicles for providing ubiquitous public sensing services. The VPS platform encompasses underlying components that address the recruitment, communication, sensing, reporting, and data analytics functionalities of a typical public sensing process. Taking into account different environmental and practical setups, the VPS platform provides potential adjustments and different approaches for the operation of each component. We anticipate that by engaging smart vehicles in providing ubiquitous sensing-based services, a plethora of information services and applications will be unleashed bringing a new era of service provisioning.