Wirelessly Powered Urban Crowd Sensing over Wearables: Trading Energy for Data

In this article, we put forward the paradigm of mobile crowd sensing based on ubiquitous wearable devices carried by human users. The key challenge for mass user involvement in prospective urban crowd sensing applications, such as monitoring of large-scale phenomena (e.g., traffic congestion and air pollution levels), is the appropriate sources of motivation. We thus advocate for the use of wireless power transfer provided in exchange for sensed data to incentivize the owners of wearables to participate in collaborative data collection. Based on this construction, we develop a novel concept of wirelessly powered crowd sensing and offer the corresponding network architecture considerations together with a systematic review of wireless charging techniques to support implementation. Further, we contribute a detailed system-level feasibility study that reports on the achievable performance levels for the envisioned setup. Finally, the underlying energy- data trading mechanisms are discussed, and the work concludes with outlining open research opportunities.