Participant selection for data collection through device-to-device communications in mobile sensing

The appearance of smart mobile devices with communication, computation and sensing capability and increasing popularity of various mobile applications have caused the explosion of mobile data recently. In the same time, mobile sensing has been emerging as a new sensing paradigm where vast numbers of mobile devices are used for sensing and collecting huge amounts of mobile data in cities. One of the challenges faced by mobile sensing is how to efficiently collect the huge amount of mobile data beyond the existing capacity of 4G networks. In this paper, we investigate the feasibility of collecting data packets from mobile devices through device-to-device communications by carefully selecting the subset of relaying (or/and sensing) devices. We formulate these problems as optimization problems and propose a set of solutions to solve them. Our experiments over a real-life mobile trace confirm the effectiveness of the proposed idea.