A mobile crowd sensing ecosystem enabled by CUPUS: Cloud-based publish/subscribe middleware for the Internet of Things

Mobile crowd sensing (MCS) is a novel class of mobile Internet of Things (IoT) applications for community sensing where sensors and mobile devices jointly collect and share data of interest to observe phenomena over a large geographic area. The inherent device mobility and high sensing frequency has the capacity to produce dense and rich spatiotemporal information about our environment, but also creates new challenges due to device dynamicity and energy constraints, as well as large volumes of generated raw sensor data which need to be processed and analyzed to extract useful information for end users. The paper presents an ecosystem for mobile crowd sensing which relies on the CloUd-based PUblish/Subscribe middleware (CUPUS) to acquire sensor data from mobile devices in a flexible and energy-efficient manner and to perform near real-time processing of Big Data streams. CUPUS has unique features compared to other MCS platforms: It enables management of mobile sensor resources within the cloud, supports filtering and aggregation of sensor data on mobile devices prior to its transmission into the cloud based on global data requirements, and can push information of interest from the cloud to user devices in near real-time. We present our experience with implementation and deployment of an MCS application for air quality monitoring built on top of the CUPUS middleware. Our experimental evaluation shows that CUPUS offers scalable processing performance, both on mobile devices and within the cloud, while its data propagation delay is mainly affected by transmission delay on wireless links.