CENTURION: Incentivizing Multi-Requester Mobile Crowd Sensing

The recent proliferation of increasingly capable mobile devices has given rise to mobile crowd sensing (MCS) systems that outsource the collection of sensory data to a crowd of participating workers that carry various mobile devices. Aware of the paramount importance of effectively incentivizing participation in such systems, the research community has proposed a wide variety of incentive mechanisms. However, different from most of these existing mechanisms which assume the existence of only one data requester, we consider MCS systems with multiple data requesters, which are actually more common in practice. Specifically, our incentive mechanism is based on double auction, and is able to stimulate the participation of both data requesters and workers. In real practice, the incentive mechanism is typically not an isolated module, but interacts with the data aggregation mechanism that aggregates workers' data. For this reason, we propose CENTURION, a novel integrated framework for multi-requester MCS systems, consisting of the aforementioned incentive and data aggregation mechanism. CENTURION's incentive mechanism satisfies truthfulness, individual rationality, computational efficiency, as well as guaranteeing non-negative social welfare, and its data aggregation mechanism generates highly accurate aggregated results. The desirable properties of CENTURION are validated through both theoretical analysis and extensive simulations

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

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

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