Large-Scale Distributed Dedicated- and Non-Dedicated Smart City Sensing Systems

The past decade has witnessed an explosion of interest in smart cities in which a set of applications, such as smart healthcare, smart lighting, and smart transportation promise to drastically improve the quality and efficiency of these services. The skeleton of these applications is formed by a network of distributed sensors that captures data, pre-processes, and transmits it to a center for further processing. While these sensors are generally perceived to be a wireless network of sensing devices that are deployed permanently as part of an application, the emerging mobile crowd-sensing (MCS) concept prescribes a drastically different platform for sensing; a network of smartphones, owned by a volunteer crowd, can capture, pre-process, and transmit the data to the same center. We call these two forms of sensors dedicated and non-dedicated sensors in this paper. While dedicated sensors imply higher deployment and maintenance costs, the MCS concept also has known implementation challenges, such as incentivizing the crowd and ensuring the trustworthiness of the captured data, and covering a wide sensing area. Due to the pros/cons of each option, the decision as to which one is better becomes a non-trivial answer. In this paper, we conduct a thorough study of both types of sensors and draw conclusions about which one becomes a favourable option based on a given application platform.