Systematic survey on artificial intelligence based mobile crowd sensing and sourcing solutions: Applications and security challenges

Abstract

Mobile Crowd Sensing/Souring (MCS) is a novel sensing approach that leverages the collective participation of users and their mobile devices to collect sensing data. As large volumes of data get stored and processed by the MCS platform, Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques are being deployed to make informed decisions that help optimize the system performance. Despite their effectiveness in solving many of the challenges, incorporating AI models in the system introduces many concerns, which could adversely affect its performance. This includes exploiting the vulnerabilities of the models by an adversary to manipulate the data and cause harm to the system. Adversarial Machine Learning (AML) is a field of research that studies attacks and defences against machine learning models. In this study, we conduct a systematic literature review to comprehensively analyze state-of-the-art works that address various aspects of AI-based MCS systems. The review focuses mainly on the applications of AI in different components of MCS, including task allocation and data aggregation, to improve its performance and enhance its security. This work also proposes a novel classification framework that can be adapted to compare works in this domain. This framework can help study AML in the context of MCS, as it facilitates identifying the attack surfaces that adversaries can exploit, and hence highlights the potential vulnerabilities of AI-based MCS systems to adversarial attacks, motivating future research to focus on designing resilient systems.