Using location based social networks for quality-aware participatory data transfer

The sensing systems that monitor physical environments rely on communication infrastructures (wired or wireless) to collect data from the sensors embedded in the environment. However, in many urban environments pre-existing communication infrastructures are not available, and installing and using new infrastructures is unjustifiably expensive and/or technically infeasible. For such environments, we envision Participatory Data Transfer (PDT) as an alternative communication medium that leverages LBSN (Location Based Social Networks) for data collection. With PDT, LBSN users use their mobile devices to receive data from sensors, and forward the sensed data through the physical network of their mobile devices as well as their connections in the online/virtual social network until the data is received by the data aggregators (data collectors). In this paper, we elaborate on this vision in the context of Quality-aware Participatory Data Transfer (Q-PDT), where PDT must be designed such that it ensures quality guarantees for the sensed data (e.g., sufficiently covering and accurately sensing, timely delivery). In particular, we define and discuss variations of the Q-PDT problem and study its computational complexity.