Incentive Facilitation for Peer Data Exchange in Crowdsensing

Abstract

With mobile devices extensively used in daily life, there are ample opportunities to exchange sensing data through them, even without centralized management. In this paper, we design a peer based data exchanging model, where relay nodes move to certain locations to connect data providers and consumers to facilitate data delivery. Consumers are willing to pay for the data and these rewards are given to both relays and data providers. We first prove the NP-hardness of the problem on how to assign relay nodes to proper locations, and present a centralized optimal method with an approximation ratio. Then we define an autonomous compensation game for relays to make their individual decisions without any central authority. The sufficient and necessary condition for the existence of Nash equilibrium is derived, and an efficient reinforcement learning solver is designed to find the exact forms of equilibria. We analyze and compare this distributed game to the centralized social optimal solution, showing that the game incurs small bounded social costs, and is efficient under various network sizes, number of providers, number of consumers and device mobility.