Exploiting mobile crowdsourcing for pervasive cloud services: challenges and solutions

With the proliferation of increasingly powerful mobile devices, mobile users can collaboratively form a mobile cloud to provide pervasive services, such as data collecting, processing, and computing. With this mobile cloud, mobile crowdsourcing, as an emerging service paradigm, can enable mobile users to take over the outsourced tasks. By leveraging the sensing capabilities of mobile devices and integrating human intelligence and machine-computation, mobile crowdsourcing has the potential to revolutionize the approach of data collecting and processing. In this article we investigate the mobile crowdsourcing architecture and applications, then discuss some research challenges and countermeasures for developing mobile crowdsourcing. Some research orientations are finally envisioned for further studies.