Crowdsensing in smart cities: Technical challenges, open issues, and emerging solution guidelines

The widespread availability of smartphones with on-board sensors has recently enabled the possibility of harvesting large quantities of monitoring data in urban areas, thus enabling so-called crowdsensing solutions, which make it possible to achieve very large-scale and fine-grained sensing by exploiting all personal resources and mobile activities in Smart Cities. In fact, the information gathered from people, systems, and things, including both social and technical data, is one of the most valuable resources available to a city's stakeholders, but its huge volume makes its integration and processing, especially in a real-time and scalable manner, very difficult. This chapter presents and discusses currently available crowdsensing and participatory solutions. After presenting the current state-of-the-art crowdsensing management infrastructures, by carefully considering the related and primary design guidelines/choices and implementation issues/opportunities, it provides an in-depth presentation of the related work in the field. Moreover, it presents some novel experimental results collected in the ParticipAct Crowdsensing Living Lab testbed, an ongoing experiment at the University of Bologna that involves 150 students for one year in a very large-scale crowdsensing campaign.