Proximity discovery and data dissemination for mobile crowd sensing using LTE direct

The pervasive and mass-market usage of smartphones and the huge amount of information that those devices with their sensors can detect or produce are enabling novel and unforeseen smart city sensing opportunities through the so-called Mobile Crowd Sensing (MCS) paradigm. MCS aims to involve volunteering citizens in data sensing activities as they roam across the city. Notwithstanding the intense recent research activity in the MCS field, current MCS platforms still exhibit some technological limitations and do not exploit at best socio-technical mechanisms (e.g., economic/social incentives) to facilitate and encourage users' participation. In this perspective, the recent evolution of direct Device-to-Device (D2D) communications, in particular novel proximity discovery technologies, represents a relevant opportunity for MCS frameworks. This paper proposes a novel solution for improving the MCS impact and citizens' participation rate by leveraging LTE Direct, i.e., one of the most recent and promising technologies for D2D proximity discovery and local data dissemination in next generation 5G networks. Our original MCS extension supports not only novel interactions with smartphones that do not necessarily host our whole MCS client (only an LTE Direct-enabled sensing module is required), but also enables new Internet of Things (IoT) scenarios where it is possible to extend smartphone sensing capabilities through D2D interactions with sensors that are dynamically determined via LTE Direct proximity discovery. To enable these new MCS features, we propose to expand the communication and data dissemination capabilities of LTE Direct via an original multi-frame transport protocol, capable of working properly also in ultra-dense scenarios with very high frame loss probability.