A trust and privacy-preserving intelligent big data collection scheme in mobile edge-cloud crowdsourcing

Abstract

As one of important Edge-Cloud solutions, mobile crowd sensing (MCS) platform resides in the cloud, and recruits massive workers in the edge network to sense data, so big data can be collected to build various applications or services to consumers, which is a promising computing paradigm. There are two critical properties that are not well addressed. One is current privacy preserving (PP) scheme pays little attention to quality-ware based data collection, so malicious or low-trust workers can cause false or low-quality data attacks, which will seriously affect the foundation of data-based services. The second is the lack of an intelligent worker selection scheme so to reduce costs and improve data quality under PP condition. To address the above issues, in this paper, we first propose a big data collection framework that not only has the function of PP but also can effectively identify worker trust, which is not achieved by previous studies. In particular, the worker trust identification approach in this paper abandons the past unreasonable assumption that data quality can be identified by the obtained data of data requester (DR). Then, we propose a reinforcement-based worker selection scheme that comprehensively considers workers’ trust, workers’ quotation and workers’ locations, so as to overcome the problem of worker recruitment that cannot be quality-ware in the past location privacy protection. Theoretical analysis and massive experimental results demonstrate that the proposed strategy is better than the state-of-the-art strategies in data quality, system cost and other performance indicator