Energy-efficient collaborative sensing with mobile phones

Mobile phones with a rich set of embedded sensors enable sensing applications in various domains. In this paper, we propose to leverage cloud-assisted collaborative sensing to reduce sensing energy consumption for mobile phone sensing applications. We formally define a minimum energy sensing scheduling problem and present a polynomial-time algorithm to obtain optimal solutions, which can be used to show energy savings that can potentially be achieved by using collaborative sensing in mobile phone sensing applications, and can also serve as a benchmark for performance evaluation. We also address individual energy consumption and fairness by presenting an algorithm to find fair energy-efficient sensing schedules. Under realistic assumptions, we present two practical and effective heuristic algorithms to find energy-efficient sensing schedules. It has been shown by simulation results based on real energy consumption (measured by the Monsoon power monitor) and location (collected from the Google Map) data that collaborative sensing significantly reduces energy consumption compared to a traditional approach without collaborations, and the proposed heuristic algorithm performs well in terms of both total energy consumption and fairness.