Incentive Mechanisms for Participatory Sensing: Survey and Research Challenges

Participatory sensing is a powerful paradigm which takes advantage of smartphones to collect and analyze data beyond the scale of what was previously possible. Given that participatory sensing systems rely completely on the users' willingness to submit up-to-date and accurate information, it is paramount to effectively incentivize users' active and reliable participation. In this paper, we survey existing literature on incentive mechanisms for participatory sensing systems. In particular, we present a taxonomy of existing incentive mechanisms for participatory sensing systems, which are subsequently discussed in depth by comparing and contrasting different approaches. Finally, we discuss an agenda of open research challenges in incentivizing users in participatory sensing.Comment: Updated version, 4/25/201

Quality of Information in Mobile Crowdsensing: Survey and Research Challenges

Smartphones have become the most pervasive devices in people's lives, and are clearly transforming the way we live and perceive technology. Today's smartphones benefit from almost ubiquitous Internet connectivity and come equipped with a plethora of inexpensive yet powerful embedded sensors, such as accelerometer, gyroscope, microphone, and camera. This unique combination has enabled revolutionary applications based on the mobile crowdsensing paradigm, such as real-time road traffic monitoring, air and noise pollution, crime control, and wildlife monitoring, just to name a few. Differently from prior sensing paradigms, humans are now the primary actors of the sensing process, since they become fundamental in retrieving reliable and up-to-date information about the event being monitored. As humans may behave unreliably or maliciously, assessing and guaranteeing Quality of Information (QoI) becomes more important than ever. In this paper, we provide a new framework for defining and enforcing the QoI in mobile crowdsensing, and analyze in depth the current state-of-the-art on the topic. We also outline novel research challenges, along with possible directions of future work.Comment: To appear in ACM Transactions on Sensor Networks (TOSN

Applications of Repeated Games in Wireless Networks: A Survey

A repeated game is an effective tool to model interactions and conflicts for players aiming to achieve their objectives in a long-term basis. Contrary to static noncooperative games that model an interaction among players in only one period, in repeated games, interactions of players repeat for multiple periods; and thus the players become aware of other players' past behaviors and their future benefits, and will adapt their behavior accordingly. In wireless networks, conflicts among wireless nodes can lead to selfish behaviors, resulting in poor network performances and detrimental individual payoffs. In this paper, we survey the applications of repeated games in different wireless networks. The main goal is to demonstrate the use of repeated games to encourage wireless nodes to cooperate, thereby improving network performances and avoiding network disruption due to selfish behaviors. Furthermore, various problems in wireless networks and variations of repeated game models together with the corresponding solutions are discussed in this survey. Finally, we outline some open issues and future research directions.Comment: 32 pages, 15 figures, 5 tables, 168 reference