Resource-Aware Photo Crowdsourcing Through Disruption Tolerant Networks

Abstract

Photo crowdsourcing with smartphone has attracted considerable attention recently due to the prevalence of smartphones and the rich information provided by photos. In scenarios such as disaster recovery or battlefield, where the cellular network is partly damaged or severely overloaded, Disruption Tolerant Networks (DTNs) become the best way to deliver the crowdsourced photos. Since the bandwidth and storage resources in DTN are very limited and not enough to deliver all the crowdsourced photos, it is important to prioritize more valuable photos to use the limited resources. In this paper, we design a resource-aware photo crowdsourcing framework in DTN, which uses photo metadata including the smartphone's location, orientation, and other built-in camera's parameters, to estimate the value of photos. We propose a photo selection algorithm to maximize the value of photos delivered to the command center considering bandwidth and storage constraints. Both prototype implementation and trace-driven simulations demonstrate the effectiveness of our design.