Cruisers: An automotive sensing platform for smart cities using door-to-door garbage collecting trucks

Due to the advance in information and communication technologies, smart cities have become an increasingly appealing vision. One indispensable basis in the research, development and implementation of smart cities is urban sensing technology. Automotive sensing is a novel urban sensing technology that equips sensors to vehicles, like buses, taxi cabs or garbage trucks and utilizes their mobility to help to conduct urban sensing tasks. In this paper, we present Cruisers, an automotive sensing platform for smart cities, based on the following ideas: a) Garbage collecting trucks are used to host sensors, b) Cellular communication network is used to deliver sensed data to servers, and c) Proxy server(s) are adopted to convert the format of sensed data to required ones, such as sampling rate, spatial interval or pub/sub protocol. To validate the feasibility of Cruisers, we implement a real system that consists of 66 customized sensing modulars integrating typical environmental and mobility sensors and deploy them into the garbage collecting trucks at Fujisawa, a medium-sized city in Japan. Performance evaluation is conducted to investigate the performance of Cruisers in terms of scalability, data publishing delay and spatial coverage.