Towards Massive Open Online Laboratories: An experience about electromagnetic crowdsensing

The diffusion of Information and Communication Technologies continuously allows users and customers to benefit from powerful devices, new functionalities and more appealing wireless services. However, the more mobile services are provided, the more telecommunication companies must comply with specific Quality of Service (QoS) levels. Therefore, users' requests can be guaranteed by increasing the offering in wireless communication services. Consequently, wireless emitting sources are becoming more and more numerous nowadays. This casts the need to assess properly the Electromagnetic (EM) field levels generated by those emitting sources without revolving to expensive monitoring assets. Additionally, some important educational aspects have to be considered as well, since nowadays many coursework from both secondary schools and universities lack of a wide and actual experiential knowledge in EM monitoring. Therefore, in this work we describe a mobile crowd-sensing application capable of gathering the received signal strength of 3G/4G mobile devices. The proposed solution has a twofold characterization: on the one hand, it behaves as an enabling platform for the provisioning of global-scale online experimental learning (i.e., Massive Online Open Laboratories, MOOL). On the other hand, it can be used as a preliminary, wide survey to identify prospective areas where EM emissions may exceed regulatory thresholds and where more accurate (but much more expensive) measurement campaigns can be performed. The application has been developed as a complete data warehouse solution and it is currently under test amongst students from the Engineering faculty at our university.