Mobile Phone Sensing as a Service: Business Model and Use Cases

With the ubiquity and ever-increasing capabilities of mobile devices and the integration of more and more sensors in them, such devices now have the potential to act not only as personal communication and computing platforms but also as sensing platforms. Mobile phone sensing is a complementary and radically different sensing approach in which smartphones fulfill the sensing role (instead of dedicated wireless sensor networks), by acting as super sensor nodes and gateways. There are several motivations behind the mobile phone sensing approach, such as: Increased sensing coverage area due to phones' mobility, enhanced information processing/validation capabilities, the addition of a social dimension to sensing, and the easy on-demand deployment of new sensors. In this paper, we propose a new business model for mobile phone sensing environments, and elaborate a new identification and charging scheme to support its operation. A number of use cases related to mobile phone sensing are also presented. The proposed business model promotes the idea of Mobile Sensing as a Service, in which a number of mobile sensing terminal operators offer their sensed data as a service to the network operator, which can then disseminate it to interested entities (e.g. specific users, communities, and network nodes).