Data Sensing and Dissemination Framework for Smart Cities

Abstract

Participatory sensing, which enables citizens to collect and share data, can be helpful to design and develop useful applications in the domain of environmental monitoring, transportation, and health-care. However, the data collection process for such applications involves dealing with a variety of data sources, ranging from fixed environmental sensors to mobile human sensors, generating and presenting data in different formats. The citizens' engagement in sensing campaigns creates additional requirements to take care of their privacy concerns and motivate them to share data. Applications also need to compute the trustworthiness of the source of information to ensure the high quality of the collected data. Consequently, successfully dealing with these issues and deploying an application in an urban environment becomes a challenging task. In this paper we present a framework that uses fixed and participatory sensing to collect data from heterogeneous sources and presents a uniform interface to disseminate data to concerned applications according to their data requirements. We used our framework to develop a participatory sensing based smart phone application enabling and motivating the citizens to report positive and negative urban environmental behaviours. We report the results of our ongoing field trial. One of our findings is that different users contribute information about different environmental issues with different intensity. Moreover, we find that the current user participation to collect and share data follows the power law.