A Sensor Network Abstraction for Flexible Public Sensing Systems

Public Sensing is a new paradigm for developing large-scale sensor networks at low cost by utilizing mobile phones that are already surrounding us in our everyday lives. In this paper we present a sensor network abstraction layer for creating flexible public sensing systems that can execute arbitrary queries. To this effect we develop several algorithms to select mobile nodes for executing a query. These algorithms allow a user to define a trade-off between quality and efficiency of query execution by choosing an appropriate algorithm. Our evaluations show that we can achieve a 99% increase in efficiency with the most efficient approaches and only about 10% decrease in result quality under worst conditions.