Abstract: More and more mobile devices are equipped with various kinds of sensors, and wireless mobile networks, such as 4G, Wi-Fi, have been largely developed and popularized in recent years. All of these factors promote the development of participatory sensing which is also called urban sensing, user-centric sensing, mobile crowd sensing. Participatory sensing can overcome the weakness of wireless sensor networks which are expensive and hard to deploy on a large scale. The participatory sensing system utilizes embedded sensors, social networks, user mobile usage behaviors and other sources where sensing data is generated and recorded in smart mobile devices to sense the physical environment, society and personality information etc. The sensing data is collected, transported and analyzed by the participatory sensing server, and processed useful sensing information is sent to data consumers. Participatory sensing is of great significance in achieving the concept of smart city, ubiquitous computing and Internet of things. The related concepts of participatory sensing and prototypes are introduced first in the paper. Then, the current hot research fields of participatory sensing, such as the participatory sensing prototype design, sensing data related problems, incentive mechanisms, privacy preserving, malicious behaviors, and frameworks in different wireless networks are elaborated in this paper. Finally, a general research method of studying participatory sensing is given.