Extending Coverage of Stationary Sensing Systems with Mobile Sensing Systems for Human Mobility Modeling

Abstract

Human mobility modeling has many applications in location-based services, mobile networking, city management, and epidemiology. Previous sensing approaches for human mobility are mainly categorized into two types: stationary sensing systems (e.g., surveillance cameras and toll booths) and mobile sensing systems (e.g., smartphone apps and vehicle tracking devices). However, stationary sensing systems only provide mobility information of human in limited coverage (e.g., camera-equipped roads) and mobile sensing systems only capture a limited number of people (e.g., people using a particular smartphone app). In this work, we design a novel system Mohen to model human mobility with a heterogeneous sensing system. The key novelty of Mohen is to fundamentally extend the sensing coverage of a large-scale stationary sensing system with a small-scale sensing system. Based on the evaluation on data from real-world urban sensing systems, our system outperforms them by 35% and achieves a competitive result to an Oracle method.