Participatory Sensing for City-Scale Applications

The rapid advancements in sensing, computation and communications have led to the proliferation of smart phones. People-centric sensing is a scientific paradigm which empowers citizens with sensor-embedded smartphones, to contribute to micro and macro-scale urban sensing applications – either implicitly (in an opportunistic manner) or explicitly (in a participatory manner). Community-based urban sensing applications, are typically participatory in nature. For instance, commuters reporting on a transit overload may explicitly need to provide an input through an app to report on the overload. This chapter will focus on the trends, challenges and applications of participatory sensing systems. Additionally, they will understand the solution requirements for effective deployments of such systems in real scenarios.