Mobile Data Collection Frameworks: A Survey

Mobile phones equipped with powerful sensors have become ubiquitous in recent years. Mobile sensing applications present an unprecedented opportunity to collect and analyze information from mobile devices. Much of the work in mobile sensing has been done on designing monolithic applications but inadequate attention has been paid to general mobile data collection frameworks. In this paper, we provide a survey on how to build a general purpose mobile data collection framework. We identify the basic requirements and present an architecture for such a framework. We survey existing works to summarize existing approaches to address the basic requirements. Eight major mobile data collection frameworks are compared with respect to the requirements as well as additional issues on privacy, energy and incentives.