A Survey on Mobile Crowd-Sensing and Its Applications in the IoT Era

Mobile crowd-sensing (MCS) is a new sensing paradigm that takes advantage of the extensive use of mobile phones that collect data efficiently and enable several significant applications. MCS paves the way to explore new monitoring applications in different fields such as social networks, lifestyle, healthcare, green applications, and intelligent transportation systems. Hence, MCS applications make use of sensing and wireless communication capabilities provided by billions of smart mobile devices, e.g., Android and iOS-based mobile devices. The aim of this paper is to identify and explore the new paradigm of MCS that is using smartphone for capturing and sharing the sensed data between many nodes. We discuss the main components of the infrastructure required to support the proposed framework. The existing and potential applications leveraging MCS are laid out. Furthermore, this paper discusses the current challenges facing the collection methodologies of the participants’ data in task management. The recent issues in the MCS findings are reviewed as well as the opportunities and challenges in sensing methods are analyzed. Finally, open research issues and future challenges facing MCS are highlighted.