When users become sensors: Can we trust their readings?

Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Smart sensor network arises as a new generation of sensor networks, where a crowd of possibly anonymous volunteers are involved in the tasks of collecting data from the surrounding environment and providing it to the community. In this paper, we analyze one of the main questions, often forgotten, in these scenarios: whether or not we can trust the sensor readings provided by the individuals engaged in the sensor network. We introduce a data reliability architecture capable of filtering and validating sensor readings in an open environment, where not all users are equally honest. Simulations based on a real world smart sensor application allow us to make a first analysis of the proposed architecture's performance and the variables that have a significant impact on this performance.