Energy-Efficient Opportunistic Collaborative Sensing

This paper studies mobile sensing in a complete distributed and opportunistic scheme. We present a novel sensing strategy for sensing nodes without movement constraints. This strategy offers information sharing and sensor scheduling that maximizes the benefits from collaboration between the nodes. We evaluate the strategy with two real world datasets, where mobile devices sense the surroundings and share the information with nearby devices via Bluetooth. We show that data sharing of energy-hungry sensing (e.g., GPS) via nearby devices can save a substantial amount of energy. Moreover, we formulate the offline measurement scheduling as a non-linear optimization problem and compare the offline optimal results with our online scheduling performance.