COSN: A collaborative opportunistic sensor networking framework for people-centric applications

People-centric participatory sensing empowers people to collect and share sensor data using mobile devices across many applications. These people-centric services utilize a client-server architecture to provide meaningful information to different participating people. In this paper we present the COSN framework that provides people-centric services without relying on an infrastructure and dedicated server support. COSN framework utilizes the opportunistic sensing paradigm to effectively exchange information by taking advantage of the mobility of portable devices like smart phones.