Acceptance-Aware Mobile Crowdsourcing Worker Recruitment in Social Networks

Abstract

With the increasing prominence of smart mobile devices, an innovative distributed computing paradigm, namely Mobile Crowdsourcing (MCS), has emerged. By directly recruiting skilled workers, MCS exploits the power of the crowd to complete location-dependent tasks. Currently, based on online social networks, a new and complementary worker recruitment mode, i.e., socially aware MCS, has been proposed to effectively enlarge worker pool and enhance task execution quality, by harnessing underlying social relationships. In this paper, we propose and develop a novel worker recruitment game in socially aware MCS, i.e., <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">A</b> cceptance-aware <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">W</b> orker <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">R</b> ecruitment ( <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">AWR</b> ). To accommodate MCS task invitation diffusion over social networks, we design a Random Diffusion model, where workers randomly propagate task invitations to social neighbors, and receivers independently make a decision whether to accept or not. Based on the diffusion model, we formulate the AWR game as a combinatorial optimization problem, which strives to search a subset of seed workers to maximize overall task acceptance under a pre-given incentive budget. We prove its NP hardness, and devise a meta-heuristic-based evolutionary approach named <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">MA-RAWR</i> to balance exploration and exploitation during the search process. Comprehensive experiments using two real-world data sets clearly validate the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed approach.