NORS: An Open Source Platform to Facilitate Participatory Sensing with Mobile Phones

With more than two billion phone subscribers worldwide and even more sold mobile phones, we can say that mobile phones are the most pervasive portable device today. Over the years their functionalities developed rapidly and today they can be used for performing tasks beyond just calling and messaging: they can provide an increasingly available intelligence at the edge of the network. This intelligence provides a fertile ground for the devices to act as sensor sinks in localized sensor networks and, furthermore, bridge between widely dispersed sensor networks through wide area connectivity. Currently, there are many sensor networks that have been deployed all over the world for various purposes. It is only natural that mobile phones would start, more and more, connecting to this available sensor infrastructure in order to use the data for customizing applications and services or collect, aggregate and provide the data to application servers. This paper presents a platform solution that allows for exploiting this very intelligence residing in everyone´s mobile device to implement, among others, participatory sensing scenarios of various kinds. The platform is available under an open source license to facilitate innovation while preserving openness of key components of the platform.