Leveraging the Power of the Crowd and Offloading Urban IoT Networks to Extend their Lifetime

The widespread deployment of connected Things in our cities allows for the enhanced management of the urban space. However, due to environmental constraints, the connected Things are often battery-powered, which affects the lifetime of the IoT Networks. We believe that the urban IoT networks must leverage the power of the crowd, leading to combine the fixed urban IoT networks with the crowdsensing capabilities of the citizens' smartphones. That is, we integrate the offloading of a portion of the traffic generated by the fixed network to mobile crowdsensing devices that also contribute with relevant urban observations (e.g., for noise pollution monitoring). This paper highlights the key technical features of the resulting solution, whose evaluation shows that we are able to extend the lifetime of the battery-operated IoT network by a up to 7 factor.