With the advent of participatory sensing (sensors integrated with consumer electronics such as cell phones and carried by people), exciting new opportunities arise. Mobile sensors (e.g., those mounted on cars or carried by people) can provide spatial sampling diversity not possible with traditional static sensor networks. Recently, participatory sensing has attracted considerable attention of research community. In this paper, we survey existing participatory sensing deployments and discuss current trends and few possible future directions. 1. Introduction As cell phones continue to become more resource-rich in terms of their processing power, memory, and display, they can support sophisticated applications ranging from browsing and messaging to navigation and gaming. The new generation cell phones have multiple embedded sensors (e.g., accelerometer, gyroscope, light, video, microphone, etc.) and can easily communicate with external sensors via any of the built-in interfaces including bluetooth, infrared, or WiFi. Currently there are more than 3 billion cell phone users in the world, and this number is increasing at an impressive rate. This makes cell phones an excellent platform for sensing the environment at unprecedented spatiotemporal granularity. For example, these cell phone users as they carry out their daily routine can use these sensors (either built-in or external or their combination) to gather data about their environment. For example, a sensor mounted on a vehicle can provide air quality observations from many locations throughout a day. The GPS information collected from people as they go about their daily lives gives us insight into public transportation systems at a level of granularity not possible before. In addition, personalized sensing provides sampling of phenomena as experienced by users, which allows us to track user experiences and support applications such as personalized medicine. In the last few years, participatory sensing has attracted a lot of attention of the sensor network research community [1–9]. There has been a number of participatory sensing deployments. However, to the best of our knowledge, there is no comprehensive survey of these deployments. In addition, details on common steps involved in building a participatory sensing application would be of great help to new researchers and focus groups. To that end, in the remainder of this section we give details on steps involved in building a participatory sensing application and describe different categories of these applications. Goldman et al. [10] classified
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