ChainSensing: A Novel Mobile Crowdsensing Framework With Blockchain

Abstract

Mobile crowdsensing (MCS) is a promising paradigm of large-scale sensing. A group of mobile users is recruited with their smart devices to accomplish various sensing tasks in specific areas. The mobility and intelligence of mobile users enable MCS to achieve a sufficient coverage ratio of sensing tasks or areas. Currently, MCS is generally proposed and implemented in a centralized way under a platform’s control. However, this centralized structure is vulnerable to a single point of failure. The platform’s failure leads to a shutdown of the entire system. In addition, there is a trust issue between the platform and mobile users because of computational transparency and financial security. It is possible that the platform manipulates the working process of MCS to obtain an improper gain. To overcome these problems, we propose a decentralized MCS framework, named ChainSensing, by leveraging blockchain. In ChainSensing, mobile users interact with blockchain via smart contracts to complete their operations, e.g., publishing sensing tasks and submitting collected data. Since there are computationally intensive problems in ChainSensing, e.g., path planning, path selection, and reward determination, it is significantly expensive to solve such problems in blockchain. Therefore, we propose to leverage smart devices and computing oracles to solve these problems. Specifically, we propose a heuristic algorithm to solve the path planning problem in smart devices of mobile users; we employ computing oracles to solve the path selection and reward determination problems. Finally, we conduct numerical simulations based on Ethereum to evaluate the performance of ChainSensing.