Building a Sensor Network of Mobile Phones

Mobile phones have two sensors: a camera and a microphone. The widespread and ubiquitous nature of mobile phones around the world makes it attractive to build a large-scale sensor network using the phones as its sensor nodes. There are several interesting challenges in realizing such a system, such as providing efficient methods for the sensor nodes to make their data available to the network, allowing the sensor network applications to access the data from potentially disconnected and highly mobile devices, ensuring that privacy constraints are met, and allowing application developers to program the sensor network as required to build new applications. We demonstrate an initial system prototype that addresses some of these concerns.