Spatio-Temporal Coverage Enhancement in Drive-By Sensing Through Utility-Aware Mobile Agent Selection

In recent years, the drive-by sensing paradigm has become increasingly popular for cost-effective monitoring of urban areas. Drive-by sensing is a form of crowdsensing wherein sensor-equipped vehicles (aka, mobile agents) are the primary data gathering agents. Enhancing the efficacy of drive-by sensing poses many challenges, an important one of which is to select non-dedicated mobile agents on which a limited number of sensors are to be mounted. This problem, which we refer to as the mobile-agent selection problem, has a significant impact on the spatio-temporal coverage of the drive-by sensing platforms and the resultant datasets. The challenge here is to achieve maximum spatiotemporal coverage while taking the relative importance levels of geographical areas into account. In this paper, we address this problem in the context of the SCOUTS project, the goal of which is to map and analyze the urban heat island phenomenon accurately. Our work makes several major technical contributions. First, we delineate a model for representing the mobile agents selection problem. This model takes into account the trajectories of the vehicles (public transportation buses in our case) and the relative importance of the urban regions, and formulates it as an optimization problem. Second, we provide two algorithms that are based upon the utility (coverage) values of mobile agents, namely, a hotspot-based algorithm that limits the search space to important sub-regions and a utility-aware genetic algorithm that enables the latter algorithm to make unbiased selections. Third, we design a highly efficient coverage redundancy minimization algorithm that, at each step, chooses the mobile agent, which provides maximal improvement to the spatio-temporal coverage. This paper reports a series of experiments on a real-world dataset from Athens, GA, USA, to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approaches.