Mobile crowdsensing leverages mobile devices (e.g., smart phones) and human mobility for pervasive information exploration and collection; it has been deemed as a promising paradigm that will revolutionize various research and application domains. Unfortunately, the practicality of mobile crowdsensing can be crippled due to the lack of incentive mechanisms that stimulate human participation. In this paper, we study incentive mechanisms for a novel Mobile Crowdsensing Scheduling (MCS) problem, where a mobile crowdsensing application owner announces a set of sensing tasks, then human users (carrying mobile devices) compete for the tasks based on their respective sensing costs and available time periods, and finally the owner schedules as well as pays the users to maximize its own sensing revenue under a certain budget. We prove that the MCS problem is NP-hard and propose polynomial-time approximation mechanisms for it. We also show that our approximation mechanisms (including both offline and online versions) achieve desirable game-theoretic properties, namely truthfulness and individual rationality, as well as Oð1Þ performance ratios. Finally, we conduct extensive simulations to demonstrate the correctness and effectiveness of our approach.
Han et al. REF studied the incentive mechanism of mobile crowdsensing networks: the platform publishes sensing tasks, followed by sensing users competing for tasks according to their sensing cost and time, and finally the sensing platform pays sensing rewards to users under budget constraints.
Truthful Scheduling Mechanisms for Powering Mobile Crowdsensing
IEEE Transactions on Computers
IEEE Transactions on Computers
Computer Science