Distributed Sensor Data Collection Using Mobile Clouds for Public Transportation

Today mobile solutions are expected to streamline all kinds of daily tasks from entertainment and communication to more specific tasks such as ordering food or buying a ticket for public transport. Social networking solutions might entail frequent image processing while mobility solutions might activate sensors in order to provide public transport operators with insights into travel patterns. All of these tasks lead to an elevation in resource expenditure which becomes a problem for everyday mobile users, especially in terms of battery life. This work proposes the usage of mobile clouds in mobility related solutions in order to offload tasks and share context specific data with nearby devices. The proposed solution is a mobile application capable of ranking nearby nodes based on their performance characteristics, and then request these nodes to participate in a shared sensor data collection according to computing principles of mobile clouds. The proposed solution can be used to both reduce energy consumption of devices and increase the amount of sensor data collected. We evaluate the solution based on both energy consumption and data loss. We measure and compare both battery drainage and data loss where the latter is evaluated by measuring sensor events sent versus received.