How Sustainable is Social Based Mobile Crowdsensing? An Experimental Study

The wide spread of smart mobile devices such as tablets and phones makes mobile crowdsensing a viable approach for collecting data and monitoring phenomena of common interest. Smart devices can sense and compute their surroundings and contribute to mechanisms that examine social and collective behaviours. Crowdsensing offers a feasible alternative to exchange and compute sensing tasks and data between devices. Due to the limited resources (i.e., battery, processing power, memory) of smart mobile devices, the cooperation and hence, the performance of the mobile crowdsensing applications may be affected. We empirically show that collective incentives, such as trust (social ties) among participants, and resources availability can boost the performance of mobile crowdsensing applications. This collective incentive together with the existing cooperation enforcing mechanisms, can enhance the cooperation of the participants and incentify them to cooperate in social based mobile crowdsensing applications.