Empowering mobile crowdsensing through social and ad hoc networking

Mobile crowdsensing (MCS) enables collective data harvesting actions by coordinating citizens willing to contribute data collected via their sensor-rich smartphones that represent sources of valuable sensing information in urban environments nowadays. One of the biggest challenges in a real long-running MCS system lies in the capacity not only to attract new volunteers, but also, and most importantly, to leverage existing social ties between volunteers to keep them involved to build long-lasting MCS communities. In addition, the advent of high-performing devices and ad hoc communication technologies can help to further amplify the effect of sensing actions in proximity of the volunteer devices. This article originally describes how to exploit these socio-technical networking aspects to increase the performance of MCS campaigns in the ParticipAct living laboratory, an ongoing MCS real-world experiment that involved about 170 students of the University of Bologna for more than two years. The article also reports some significant experimental results to quantify the effectiveness of the proposed techniques.