Guest editorial: Special issue on crowd sensing networks

With the miniaturization of sensors, we have been witnessing the popularity of the sensor-build-in mobile devices over the past few years. This creates a new trend for next generation sensor networks: the crowd sensing networks (CSNs), which is expected to provide a promising platform for the acquiring of ubiquitous and participatory sensing data. With the involvement of a huge number of mobile users or other devices such as sensor-equipped vehicles, the crowd sensing networks can provide a lot of novel and valuable applications such as environmental monitoring and protection, traffic jam alternatives, citizen-journalism, tourist query, wireless indoor localization, etc. Although there have been remarkable developments in the field of crowd sensing, we still facemany challenging issues that need to be addressed in order to achieve the success of crowd sensing, e.g. how to optimize the routing scheme to improve the reliability and performance of the CSNswith limited battery and memory; how to design incentive mechanism to motivate mobile users to participate the sensing work; how to resist attacks and protect the privacy of the CSNs users, etc. These problems can be even more severe with the emerging new applications. This Special Issue on CSNs devoted to recent addressing these challenges. A Call for Papers was issued in early 2014, with the submission deadline set to November 1st, 2014. We have received an overwhelming number of submissions, and ultimately 14 high quality papers were selected for this special issue. The paper BA reliable QoS-aware routing scheme for neighbor area network in smart grid^, authored by Xiaoheng Deng, Lifang He, Xu Li, Qiang Liu, Lin Cai, and Zhigang Chen, proposes a neighbor area network routing scheme to meet the QoS requirements of different smart grid applications, and a routing reliability optimization method to further improve the network reliability. The paper BMulti-hop Data ForwardingMethod for Crowd Sensing Networks^, authored by Yeonsu Jung and Yunju Baek, focuses on the CSNs with limitation of energy consumption and memory usage. The authors propose a lightweight multi-hop data forwarding method, and adopt a novel address abbreviation method to handle the packet fragmentation problem resulted from utilizing DSR over IEEE 802.15.4. The paper BCLEVER: cluster-based energy-aware virtual ring routing in randomly deployed wireless sensor networks^, authored by Ghofrane Fersi, Wassef Louati, and Maher Ben Jemaa, presents another novel routing protocol for the networks with energy-constrained nodes. Compared to existing approaches, the proposed method shows a significant improvement in the network lifetime and energy consumption. The paper BPerceiving who and when to leverage data delivery for maritime networks: an optimal stopping view ,̂ * Mianxiong Dong [email protected]