A Survey of Mobile Crowdsensing Techniques: A Critical Component for the Internet of Things

Mobile crowdsensing serves as a critical building block for the emerging Internet of Things (IoT) applications. However, the sensing devices continuously generate a large amount of data, which consumes much resources (e.g., bandwidth, energy and storage), and may sacrifice the quality-of-service (QoS) of applications. Prior work has demonstrated that there is significant redundancy in the content of the sensed data. By judiciously reducing the redundant data, the data size and the load can be significantly reduced, thereby reducing resource cost, facilitating the timely delivery of unique, probably critical information and enhancing QoS. This paper presents a survey of existing works for the mobile crowdsensing strategies with emphasis on reducing the resource cost and achieving high QoS. We start by introducing the motivation for this survey, and present the necessary background of crowdsensing and IoT. We then present various mobile crowdsensing strategies and discuss their strengths and limitations. Finally, we discuss the future research directions for mobile crowdsensing. The survey addresses a broad range of techniques, methods, models, systems and applications related to mobile crowdsensing and IoT. Our goal is not only to analyze and compare the strategies proposed in the prior works but also to discuss their applicability towards the IoT, and provide the guidance on the future research direction of mobile crowdsensing.