Energy Efficient Flow Coverage Scheme for Mobile Crowd Sensing in Urban Streets

Recently, mobile crowd sensing (MCS) is an important approach for collecting data from the participants in the urban streets. The main problem in collecting data process is how to cover all segments the street sides and select a minimal number of participants in each street segment that preserves the energy of the mobile devices and prolongs the MCS network lifetime. To solve this problem, a new flow coverage scheme is proposed to cover a specific street and achieve the coverage requirements. The proposed scheme is based on using a modified localization method that uses a minimal usage of GPS and utilizes the Zig-bee technology to communicate with the neighbor nodes and estimate the distance between nodes by using the Time of Arrival method. Experimental results by using a real data show that the proposed localization and coverage scheme can achieve high localization accuracy, reduce the usage of location sensors, and prove that the proposed street coverage scheme achieves the coverage requirements.