PS-Sim: A Framework for Scalable Simulation of Participatory Sensing Data

TL;DR

This paper introduces PS-Sim, a scalable simulation framework that models human participation and event distribution in participatory sensing, aiding validation of PS applications without real-world data.

Contribution

The work presents a novel, empirically validated simulation framework for participatory sensing that accurately replicates real-world participation and event behaviors.

Findings

Synthetic data closely matches real participation patterns

PS-Sim effectively models event occurrence distributions

Validated using real vehicular traffic dataset

Abstract

Emergence of smartphone and the participatory sensing (PS) paradigm have paved the way for a new variant of pervasive computing. In PS, human user performs sensing tasks and generates notifications, typically in lieu of incentives. These notifications are real-time, large-volume, and multi-modal, which are eventually fused by the PS platform to generate a summary. One major limitation with PS is the sparsity of notifications owing to lack of active participation, thus inhibiting large scale real-life experiments for the research community. On the flip side, research community always needs ground truth to validate the efficacy of the proposed models and algorithms. Most of the PS applications involve human mobility and report generation following sensing of any event of interest in the adjacent environment. This work is an attempt to study and empirically model human participation behavior and event occurrence distributions through development of a location-sensitive data simulation framework, called PS-Sim. From extensive experiments it has been observed that the synthetic data generated by PS-Sim replicates real participation and event occurrence behaviors in PS applications, which may be considered for validation purpose in absence of the groundtruth. As a proof-of-concept, we have used real-life dataset from a vehicular traffic management application to train the models in PS-Sim and cross-validated the simulated data with other parts of the same dataset.