Mobile Crowdsourcing in Smart Cities: Technologies, Applications, and Future Challenges

Local administrations and governments aim at leveraging wireless communications and Internet of Things (IoT) technologies to manage the city infrastructures and enhance the public services in an efficient and sustainable manner. Furthermore, they strive to adopt smart and cost-effective mobile applications to deal with major urbanization problems, such as natural disasters, pollution, and traffic congestion. Mobile crowdsourcing (MCS) is known as a key emerging paradigm for enabling smart cities, which integrates the wisdom of dynamic crowds with mobile devices to provide decentralized ubiquitous services and applications. Using MCS solutions, residents (i.e., mobile carriers) play the role of active workers who generate a wealth of crowdsourced data to significantly promote the development of smart cities. In this paper, we present an overview of state-of-the-art technologies and applications of MCS in smart cities. First, we provide an overview of MCS in smart cities and highlight its major characteristics. Second, we introduce the general architecture of MCS and its enabling technologies. Third, we study novel applications of MCS in smart cities. Finally, we discuss several open problems and future research challenges in the context of MCS in smart cities.