Analysis of Smartphone User Mobility Traces for Opportunistic Data Collection

Considering that smartphones are tightly-coupled with their users, the interaction between smartphones and wireless sensor networks will play a very important role in pervasive computing for improving our daily life. Instead of using smartphones to access the services provided by various wireless sensor networks, we focus on using smartphones to collect data from sensor nodes opportunistically. In this paper, through analyzing the dataset from Mobile Data Challenge by Nokia, we validated the feasibility of opportunistic data collection and identified several important characteristics of smartphone users’ mobility, such as the strong spatial and temporal localities that should be considered when designing the related protocols and algorithms.