Crowdsourcing in Heterogeneous Networked Environments - Opportunities and Challenges

Crowd sourcing has become a term used to describe a broad variety of effective approaches that engage potentially large and open crowds of participants for the undertaking of a task. The emergence of Heterogeneous Networks (Het Nets) that brings about a significant expansion of existing mobile network capacity will enable and accelerate new forms of mobile and ubiquitous crowd sourcing. This paper aims to explore some of the opportunities and challenges that will face crowd sourcing-based approaches in emerging heterogeneous networked environments. A conceptual architecture for a context-aware mobile crowd sourcing platform is proposed.