《4W1H in mobile crowd sensing》Review

Mobile Crowd Sensing(MCS)

Mobile crowd sensing refers to the sensing paradigm(感应模式) in which mobile users with sensing and computing devices are assigned to collect and contribute data in order to enable various applications. MCS applications leverage(利用) the sensing,computing and wireless communication capability(传感，计算和无线通信能力) offered by the millions of mobile devices.
Although there are lots of achievements in MCS, there still lacks a systematic study and classification about the research problems in the MCS research domain to guide the further research and development of this thriving field.

4W1H

The author uses 4W1H to describe the life-cycle of MCS process, which refers to What/When/Were/Who/How. And 4W1H is also respectively applied in each stage of the MCS life-cycle.
The paper divide the life-cycle of MCS process into four stages: Task Creation, Task Assignment, Individual Task Execution, and Crowd Data Integration.
4W1H in Task Creation:
What: it refers to what applications the MCS tasks intend to support; it roughly contains two broad
categories:Urban Computing,Social Computing.
Where/When: ‘Where’ and ‘when’ refer to the spatial and temporal features of MCS tasks, they can
be classified into the following four categories:Short-range Short-term,Long-range Short-term,Short-range Long-term,Long-range Long-term.
Who: Currently, the MCS task organizers are usually large organizations, such as academic
institutions, government agencies, and business corporations, as creating the MCS task and platform
is quite tedious. When appropriate tools and platforms for task creation are ready, individual users
are expected to create an MCS task easily.
How: The most common research issue in task creation is to simplify the task creation process for
the MCS organizer so that more people with little or no programming skill could also create MCS
tasks.
4W1H in Task Assignment
Who: The fundamental problem in task assignment is to find enough and appropriate participants
to fulfill the MCS task (‘Who should be selected for participating MCS tasks?’), i.e., the participant
recruitment and selection mechanism. Participants are usually recruited on a volunteering basis with
certain incentives offered, often some of them are selected based on criteria which can optimize
certain objective functions (e.g. maximizing area coverage or selecting high-reputation persons).
What: ‘What’ refers to what type of platforms the MCS organizer uses to recruit participants. There
are generally two types of recruitment platforms: (1) Open public platforms, where MCS organizers
publish the tasks and incentives to the public on-line, and the users decide if they want to participate
in a certain task according to their price and availability [7].
Where: ‘Where’ refers to the coverage area of the selected participants. For many location-centric
MCS tasks, area coverage is a critical concern.
When: ‘When’ refers to the timing to assign tasks. Traditional MCS task assignment methods recruit
participants before the MCS task starts, which we term it static assignment. However, some advanced
MCS task assignment schemes use dynamic assignment, i.e., assigning tasks to participants during the
MCS task execution process, so that the organizer could choose appropriate participants according to
the ongoing MCS task execution/completion status, for purposes such as saving energy consumption,
reducing participant budget, or ensuring area coverage, etc.
How: The research issues in this stage investigate how to save participants’ total energy consumption
/ reduce task completion time / maximize area coverage / minimize participants’ incentives by using
intelligent task assignment methods.
4W1H in Individual Task Execution
What: ‘What’ in this stage refers to the objective of the individual task (i.e. what to sense, what to
compute, and what to upload).
When: ‘When’ refers to the timing to conduct individual task (i.e. when to sense, when to compute,
and when to upload).
Where: For sensing, computing, and uploading sub-stages, ‘where’ has slightly different meanings.
For example, ‘Where to sense’ is about the geographical area where sensors need to be triggered;
‘Where to compute’ is about where computation is done to process the sensed data (in smartphone or
server); and ‘Where to upload’ is about the data uploading target (to central server or an intermediate
device).
Who: ‘Who’ refers to the participant executing the individual task (i.e., who to sense, who to compute,
and who to upload).
How: ‘How’ is about developing mechanisms by addressing the above-mentioned 4W issues to fulfill
the goal of saving energy, reducing mobile data cost, ensuring sensing coverage, etc.
4W1H in Crowd Data Integration
What: It refers to what tools and mechanisms can facilitate data storage, mining, and dissemination.
When: ‘When’ refers to the timing to integrate crowd data.
Who: We consider ‘who’ as people who can benefit from the crowd data integration results.
Where: Traditionally, the MCS organizer develops a central server from scratch. As cloud computing
and PaaS technology become popular, an alternative approach is leveraging existing web services
such as AWS to build a cloud central server.
How: The key issue in crowd data integration is to fulfill the MCS task objectives by processing the
sensed data from participants. ‘How’ thus refers to the combination of mechanisms which handle the
above 4W issues.

FUTURE MCS RESEARCH DIRECTIONS

1. Allowing general public to be MCS organizer.
2. Creating MCS task for emergency situations.
3. Offering both personalized and general results.
4. Scaling ‘real-time’ MCS applications to large scope.