The design of user-centric mobile crowdsensing with cooperative D2D communications

Ubiquitous sensor-rich smartphones have promoted MCS, an emerging people-centric sensing paradigm for urban IoT. However, using cellular networks to transmit the big data collected by MCS would incur expensive financial costs for both participating phone users and the MCS organizer. A promising solution to this is to integrate the low-cost D2D communication into the MCS design. However, using D2D in MCS will require cooperative interactions among self-interested and strategic participating phone users, which significantly complicates the “human-in-the-loop” MCS design in both the digital and human dimensions, and brings a branch of new challenges: data communication and networking become more complex; D2D connections among opportunistically encountered phone users must be secure, fast, and user-transparent; and participating phone users need to be properly incentivized. In dealing with these challenges, this article covers recent developments of D2D-enabled MCS from both the theoretical and practical perspectives. Future research questions in this rapidly growing field are also discussed.