Towards spatial crowdsourcing in vehicular networks using mobile agents

Abstract

In the last years, the automotive industry has shown interest in the addition of computing and communication devices to cars, thanks to the technological advances in these fields but also to meet the increasing demand of “connected” applications and services.Although vehicular networks have not been fully developed yet, they could be used in a near future as a means to provide a number of interesting applications and services that need the exchange of data among vehicles and other data sources.For example, we can consider the collection of information within an interesting area in a city using a spatial crowdsourcing schema that takes advantage of the network formed by the vehicles, as well as the interests of the people that travel aboard them.In this paper, we present a preliminary spatial crowdsourcing approach that uses the technology of mobile agents to accomplish the collection and querying of data in such a scenario, supported by realistic simulations that prove that the proposal is promising.