A Survey on Mobile Crowd Sensing: Concepts, Applications, Technologies, and Future Directions

Mobile Crowd Sensing (MCS) is a new sensing paradigm that uses portable intelligent mobile devices (smartphones, wearable devices, etc.) carried by users to capture dynamic changes of social and urban information. Thanks to the ubiquity of mobile devices, MCS is able to collect data efficiently and achieve some valuable practical applications. Research reviews on MCS mostly focus on a single direction such as task assignment or incentive mechanism. This paper comprehensively reviews the research work on task allocation, incentive mechanisms, quality control and privacy protection in recent years. First, the system architecture and workflow of MCS are described and representative applications of MCS are illustrated. Furthermore, taking MCS as the target object, this paper expounds and discusses key issues such as task allocation, incentive mechanisms, quality control, and privacy protection, and introduces the latest research results in these fields. Subsequently, we provide a systematic review of the datasets reported in the literature. Ultimately, we point out the limitations of existing studies and look forward to future research directions to provide valuable references for related researchers.