effSense: A Novel Mobile Crowd-Sensing Framework for Energy-Efficient and Cost-Effective Data Uploading

Energy consumption and mobile data cost are two key factors affecting users’ willingness to participate in mobile crowd-sensing tasks. While data-plan (DP) users are mostly concerned with energy consumption, non-data-plan (NDP) users are more sensitive to data cost. Traditional ways of data uploading in mobile crowdsensing tasks often go to two extremes: either in real time or completely offline after the whole task is over. In this paper, we propose effSense—an energy-efficient and cost-effective data uploading framework, which utilizes adaptive uploading schemes within fixed data uploading cycles. In each cycle, effSense empowers the participants with a distributed decision making scheme to choose the appropriate timing and network to upload data. effSense reduces data cost for NDP users by maximally offloading data to Bluetooth/WiFi gateways or DP users encountered; it reduces energy consumption for DP users by piggybacking data on a call or using more energy-efficient networks rather than initiating new 3G connections. By leveraging the predictability of users’ calls and mobility, effSense selects proper uploading strategies for both user types. Our evaluation with the MIT reality mining and Nodobo datasets shows that effSense can reduce 55%–65% energy consumption for DP users, and 48%–52% data cost for NDP users, respectively, compared to traditional uploading schemes.