Mobile devices as an infrastructure: A survey of opportunistic sensing technology

Abstract

Now that billions of people carry sensor-enabled mobile devices (e.g., smartphones), employing powerful capability of such commercial mobile products has become a promising approach for large-scale environmental and human-behavioral sensing. Such a new paradigm of scalable context monitoring is known as opportunistic sensing, and has been successfully applied to a broad range of applications. In this paper, we briefly introduce basic architecture and building blocks on which these emerging systems are based, and then provide a survey of recent progress in the opportunistic sensing technology.