Localized cooperation for crowdsensing in a fog computing-enabled internet-of-things

In this article, we describe and evaluate a crowdsensing approach that entails local cooperation between crowdsensing participants in smart environments, utilizing an underlying fog computing-enabled Internet of Things. A fog computing-based Internet-of-Things architecture involves a layer of computing nodes residing closer to the sensing devices, with this layer of fog nodes lying in between mobile and sensing devices at the network edge and the cloud. This motivates us to propose a model for crowdsensing in smart environments that involves both competition and cooperation between nearby crowdsensing participants at the edge network. Comprehensive simulations are presented to evaluate the performance of the proposed approach. The work shows desirable characteristics in terms of number of active participants, number of samples collected within a given budget and coverage, resulting from localized cooperation by crowdsensing participants at the edge layer that can support various smart environment applications.