A General Framework for Participatory Sensing Systems

Participatory Sensing (PS) systems consist of many mobile users collecting data in a cooperative way. Due to the spatial resolution that a PS system can provide, we are now capable of detecting and analysing events that occur at different spatial scales. Nevertheless, since the measuring devices are cheaper and they are in the hands of the users, PS systems face several design challenges related to the sensor’s accuracy and failures, tampered data, user’s privacy, participation, and visualization. However, the previous work in the area of participatory sensing has focused on particular problems or just a subset of these challenges. Taking this into account, this paper proposes a general framework to guide the design and implementation of PS systems that considers all these challenges, splitting the design into 5 modules: sample size determination, data collection, data verification, data visualization, and density maps generation modules. P-Sense, a PS system to monitor pollution levels, is used as a validation example and to describe some of the solutions available thus far