Cooperative resource bartering on internet overlay for urban-scale smart sensing applications

The majority of advancements in wireless sensor network research have been focusing on the development of a series of specialized application over a small-scaled testbed. We envision that an urban-scale sensing network will take place, and connect many daily applications together. Most importantly, the new paradigm is people-centric, as opposed to people being bystanders of the system. We present the challenges in this new area, particularly, the information relay over ad-hoc connections, and proposed solutions to our ongoing design. We adopted the ideas from peer-to-peer networks, where contribution from individual users determine the overall performance of the whole network, and proposed a bartering-based, incentive-provisioning middleware for this new paradigm.