Research paper: Did Anybody See That? Smartphone Tracking for Historical Data Retrieval

by Vikram P. Munishwa and Nael B. Abu-Ghazaleh

ABSTRACT

Smartphones have revolutionized the way in which sensing has been performed traditionally. The people-centric nature of smartphone-based sensing enables them to be a part of participatory or opportunistic sensing, where data is collected on a set of designated smartphones and delivered to a server. In this work, we identify the existence of another type of behavior, where the data is not delivered but archived locally on the phones for later retrieval. This type of behavior is common when the phone users capture some data (e.g. a video clip) out of their own interest. However, this complicates the future data retrievals due to the uncontrolled mobility of the data-capturing smartphones. Specially, the research

challenges for later data retrieval include finding the current locations of the required subset of the mobile phones that were present in a specific region at a specific time, without compromising location and identity privacy of the phone user. We discuss existing as well as novel architectural alternatives that can be used to address this problem, along with their qualitative evaluation

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