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Wirelessly Powered Urban Crowd Sensing over Wearables: Trading Energy for Data

In this article, we put forward the mobile crowd sensing paradigm based on ubiquitous wearable devices carried by human users. The key challenge for mass user involvement into prospective urban crowd sending applications, such as monitoring of large-scale phenomena (e.g., traffic congestion and air pollution levels), is the appropriate sources of motivation. We thus advocate for the use of wireless power transfer provided in exchange for sensed data to incentivize the owners of wearables to participate in collaborative data collection. Based on this construction, we develop the novel concept of wirelessly powered crowd sensing and offer the corresponding network architecture considerations together with a systematic review of wireless charging techniques to implement it. Further, we contribute a detailed system-level feasibility study that reports on the achievable performance levels for the envisioned setup. Finally, the underlying energy-data trading mechanisms are discussed, and the work is concluded with outlining open research opportunities.