Collaborative Sensing in Internet of Things: A Comprehensive Survey

Collaborative sensing leverages the cooperation of a collection of sensors to complete a large-scale sensing task in Internet of Things (IoT). Although some previous studies have reviewed the literature of collaborative sensing in sensor networks, there still lacks a systematic and holistic overview with the consideration of practical application needs in IoT. In this article, we highlight that sensing application is coupled with sensing mechanism and sensing collaboration, and comprehensively survey the sensing mechanism, collaboration and applications in the context of IoT. Specifically, we first give an introduction of sensing technologies widely employed in IoT applications. Then, we systematically expatiate on more design issues for collaborative sensing, i.e., sensing models, deployment methods, sensing scheduling strategies and metrics for sensing quality. Next, the network-wide sensing collaboration is expatiated through three fundamental types of coverage problems as well as their solutions and insightful observations. Furthermore, we discuss promising sensing applications and elaborate how the sensing problem is established from the realistic application requirements and how the sensing quality impacts the application performance. Finally, we discuss several inspiring future research directions.