On the recruitment of smart vehicles for urban sensing

With the abundant on-board resources in intelligent vehicles, they have become major candidates for providing ubiquitous services, including urban sensing. This paper proposes an efficient recruitment scheme for vehicles in urban sensing applications. Our trajectory-based recruitment (TBR) scheme solves the problem of participant selection by considering spatiotemporal availability of participants. The aim of TBR is choosing the minimum number of vehicles that achieve a required level of coverage for the area of interest. TBR utilizes the easy-to-acquire trajectories of the candidate vehicles as indicators of the availability of participants, and applies a minimal-cover greedy algorithm for selection. The basic greedy algorithm is adapted to handle some practical scenarios, including departing vehicles and varying redundancy requirements. The paper also discusses two data acquisition models for retrieving the sensing data (on-demand and unsolicited). Assessment of TBR shows that it achieves high levels of coverage even when vehicles do not stick to their announced trajectories.