# CrowdPower: A Novel Crowdsensing-as-a-Service Platform for Real-Time Incident Reporting
## 2 Related Work and Literature Review
The framework supports a well-defined trust model and uses Mix network to provide anonymization. The AnonySense server is divided into three components, RA (Registration Authority), TS (Task Service), and RS (Report Service). The tasks are executed as sensor requests on the phone and not executable code. The framework supports privacy, security, and anonymity and allows data aggregation on the server. Using a proprietary language reduces security leaks but prevents the reuse of existing third-party libraries. AnonySense has scalability issues because of the pull model of obtaining tasks and performance issues because of the use of the Mix network. Contrary to CrowdPower, this framework does not support the submission of spontaneous or voluntary sensory data from mobile users who are producers, which is an important feature required for incident reporting. CenceMe [32] exploits off-the-shelf sensor-enabled mobile phones to infer people's presence automatically. This framework classifies streams from different devices and uses two types of classifiers, Power Aware Duty Cycle, and Software Portability. It is one of the first applications to automatically retrieve and publish sensing presence to social networks using the Nokia N95 mobile phones. Dynamix [33] is an open-source plug-n-play contextual framework for Android that provides a community-based approach to context-aware computing. It supports the automatic discovery and integration of framework components at runtime. It has a modular and configurable architecture that provides real-time discovery and integration of plug-ins and provides detailed custom settings for privacy and security, but the processing and computation is limited to on the phone itself. One of the earlier attempts at creating service-based sensing applications is the Web Architectures for Service Platforms (WASP) project [34]. WASP allows applications to dynamically subscribe to contextual information. WASP has its language and processing performed on either the phone or the cloud. The framework defines two types of service units: function and action. Function as a service unit performs a computation with no side effects, and action as a service unit performs a computation with side effects for one or more parties in the system. The complex computation and processing are handled on the server side, and applications add, update, or delete their subscriptions at run-time. WASP uses an expressive language for application subscriptions and requirements. The frameworks' support for knowledge representation is restricted to the UML class and does not support ontologies. Most architectures propose proprietary languages for OS abstractions or specify sandboxed environments for the secure execution of applications. While this would be convenient, the fact that only pre-defined functions and software modules are provided hampersthe flexibility of application developers. Moreover, most of these solutions support a limited range of sensory data and are either opportunistic or participatory sensing. In addition, existing approaches do not address the social aspect of crowdsensing and fail to consider sensing communities and voluntary sensing. Those solutions proposed specialized applications to demonstrate their capabilities instead of a generic crowdsensing application that could be used for many cases--this approach requires developing a new application for each use case, which is not practical. Finally, existing solutions lack the end-to-end practical implementation covering different aspects of MSaaS, which are necessary to make the concept of crowdsensing a reality. In comparison to existing solutions, the main features that set this research apart from the rest are the following: CrowdPower is a comprehensive MSaaS platform offering a generic sensing gateway application that can be used for various crowdsensing use/cases scenarios. Unlike existing solutions that offer one specialized application per use case, CrowdPower aims at offering a comprehensive and standardized approach to mobile crowdsensing.