Privacy Management and Optimal Pricing in People-Centric Sensing

With the emerging sensing technologies such as mobile crowdsensing and Internet of Things (IoT), people-centric data can be efficiently collected and used for analytics and optimization purposes. This data is typically required to develop and render people-centric services. In this paper, we address the privacy implication, optimal pricing, and bundling of people-centric services. We first define the inverse correlation between the service quality and privacy level from data analytics perspectives. We then present the profit maximization models of selling standalone, complementary, and substitute services. Specifically, the closed-form solutions of the optimal privacy level and subscription fee are derived to maximize the gross profit of service providers. For interrelated people-centric services, we show that cooperation by service bundling of complementary services is profitable compared to the separate sales but detrimental for substitutes. We also show that the market value of a service bundle is correlated with the degree of contingency between the interrelated services. Finally, we incorporate the profit sharing models from game theory for dividing the bundling profit among the cooperative service providers.Comment: 16 page

Incentive Mechanism Design in Mobile Crowdsensing Systems

In the past few years, the popularity of Mobile Crowdsensing Systems (MCSs) has been greatly prompted, in which sensory data can be ubiquitously collected and shared by mobile devices in a distributed fashion. Typically, a MCS consists of a cloud platform, sensing tasks, and mobile users equipped with mobile devices, in which the mobile users carry out sensing tasks and receive monetary rewards as compensation for resource consumption ( e.g., energy, bandwidth, and computation) and risk of privacy leakage ( e.g., location exposure). Compared with traditional mote-class sensor networks, MCSs can reduce the cost of deploying specialized sensing infrastructures and enable many applications that require resources and sensing modalities beyond the current mote-class sensor processes as today’s mobile devices (smartphones (iPhones, Sumsung Galaxy), tablets (iPad) and vehicle-embedded sensing devices (GPS)) integrate more computing, communication, and storage resources than traditional mote-class sensors. The current applications of MCSs include traffic congestion detection, wireless indoor localization, pollution monitoring, etc . There is no doubt that one of the most significant characteristics of MCSs is the active involvement of mobile users to collect and share sensory data. In this dissertation, we study the incentive mechanism design in mobile crowdsensing system with consideration of economic properties. Firstly, we investigate the problem of joining sensing task assignment and scheduling in MCSs with the following three considerations: i) partial fulfillment, ii) attribute diversity, and iii) price diversity. Then, we design a distributed auction framework to allow each task owner to independently process its local auction without collecting global information in a MCS, reducing communication cost. Next, we propose a cost-preferred auction scheme (CPAS) to assign each winning mobile user one or more sub- working time durations and a time schedule-preferred auction scheme (TPAS) to allocate each winning mobile user a continuous working time duration. Secondly, we focus on the design of an incentive mechanism for an MCS to minimize the social cost. The social cost represents the total cost of mobile devices when all tasks published by the MCS are finished. We first present the working process of a MCS, and then build an auction market for the MCS where the MCS platform acts as an auctioneer and users with mobile devices act as bidders. Depending on the different requirements of the MCS platform, we design a Vickrey-Clarke-Groves (VCG)-based auction mechanism for the continuous working pattern and a suboptimal auction mechanism for the discontinuous working pattern. Both of them can ensure that the bidding of users are processed in a truthful way and the utilities of users are maximized. Through rigorous theoretical analysis and comprehensive simulations, we can prove that these incentive mechanisms satisfy economic properties and can be implemented in reasonable time complexcity. Next, we discuss the importance of fairness and unconsciousness of MCS surveillance applications. Then, we propose offline and online incentive mechanisms with fair task scheduling based on the proportional share allocation rules. Furthermore, to have more sensing tasks done over time dimension, we relax the truthfulness and unconsciousness property requirements and design a (ε, μ)-unconsciousness online incentive mechanism. Real map data are used to validate these proposed incentive mechanisms through extensive simulations. Finally, future research topics are proposed to complete the dissertation

Profit Maximization Auction and Data Management in Big Data Markets

A big data service is any data-originated resource that is offered over the Internet. The performance of a big data service depends on the data bought from the data collectors. However, the problem of optimal pricing and data allocation in big data services is not well-studied. In this paper, we propose an auction-based big data market model. We first define the data cost and utility based on the impact of data size on the performance of big data analytics, e.g., machine learning algorithms. The big data services are considered as digital goods and uniquely characterized with "unlimited supply" compared to conventional goods which are limited. We therefore propose a Bayesian profit maximization auction which is truthful, rational, and computationally efficient. The optimal service price and data size are obtained by solving the profit maximization auction. Finally, experimental results on a real-world taxi trip dataset show that our big data market model and auction mechanism effectively solve the profit maximization problem of the service provider.Comment: 6 pages, 9 figures. This paper was accepted by IEEE WCNC conference in Dec. 201

A Service Based Architecture for Multidisciplinary IoT Experiments with Crowdsourced Resources

Research on emerging networking paradigms, such as Mobile Crowdsensing Systems, requires new types of experiments to be conducted and an increasing spectrum of devices to be supported by experimenting facilities. In this work, we present a service based architecture for IoT testbeds which (a) exposes the operations of a testbed as services by following the Testbed as a Service (TBaaS) paradigm; (b) enables diverse facilities to be federated in a scalable and standardized way and (c) enables the seamless integration of crowdsourced resources (e.g. smartphones and wearables) and their abstraction as regular IoT resources. The architecture enables an experimenter to access a diverse set of resources and orchestrate experiments via a common interface by hiding the underlying heterogeneity and complexity. This way, the field of IoT experimentation with real resources is further promoted and broadened to also address researchers from other fields and discipline

Integration of Blockchain and Auction Models: A Survey, Some Applications, and Challenges

In recent years, blockchain has gained widespread attention as an emerging technology for decentralization, transparency, and immutability in advancing online activities over public networks. As an essential market process, auctions have been well studied and applied in many business fields due to their efficiency and contributions to fair trade. Complementary features between blockchain and auction models trigger a great potential for research and innovation. On the one hand, the decentralized nature of blockchain can provide a trustworthy, secure, and cost-effective mechanism to manage the auction process; on the other hand, auction models can be utilized to design incentive and consensus protocols in blockchain architectures. These opportunities have attracted enormous research and innovation activities in both academia and industry; however, there is a lack of an in-depth review of existing solutions and achievements. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive state-of-the-art survey of these two research topics. We review the existing solutions for integrating blockchain and auction models, with some application-oriented taxonomies generated. Additionally, we highlight some open research challenges and future directions towards integrated blockchain-auction models

Empirical Analysis of Privacy Preservation Models for Cyber Physical Deployments from a Pragmatic Perspective

The difficulty of privacy protection in cyber-physical installations encompasses several sectors and calls for methods like encryption, hashing, secure routing, obfuscation, and data exchange, among others. To create a privacy preservation model for cyber physical deployments, it is advised that data privacy, location privacy, temporal privacy, node privacy, route privacy, and other types of privacy be taken into account. Consideration must also be given to other types of privacy, such as temporal privacy. The computationally challenging process of incorporating these models into any wireless network also affects quality of service (QoS) variables including end-to-end latency, throughput, energy use, and packet delivery ratio. The best privacy models must be used by network designers and should have the least negative influence on these quality-of-service characteristics. The designers used common privacy models for the goal of protecting cyber-physical infrastructure in order to achieve this. The limitations of these installations' interconnection and interface-ability are not taken into account in this. As a result, even while network security has increased, the network's overall quality of service has dropped. The many state-of-the-art methods for preserving privacy in cyber-physical deployments without compromising their performance in terms of quality of service are examined and analyzed in this research. Lowering the likelihood that such circumstances might arise is the aim of this investigation and review. These models are rated according to how much privacy they provide, how long it takes from start to finish to transfer data, how much energy they use, and how fast their networks are. In order to maximize privacy while maintaining a high degree of service performance, the comparison will assist network designers and researchers in selecting the optimal models for their particular deployments. Additionally, the author of this book offers a variety of tactics that, when used together, might improve each reader's performance. This study also provides a range of tried-and-true machine learning approaches that networks may take into account and examine in order to enhance their privacy performance