Incentive mechanisms for mobile crowd sensing based on supply-demand relationship

Abstract

Mobile crowd sensing has become an efficient paradigm for performing large scale sensing tasks. An incentive mechanism is important for the mobile crowd sensing system to stimulate participants, and to achieve good service quality. In this paper, we design the incentive mechanisms for mobile crowd sensing, where the price and supply of the resource contributed by the smartphone users are determined by the supply-demand relationship of market. We present two models of mobile crowd sensing: the resource model and the budget model. In the resource model, each sensing task has the least resource demand. In the budget model, each task has a budget constraint. We design an incentive mechanism for each of the two models. Through both rigorous theoretical analysis and extensive simulations, we demonstrate that the proposed incentive mechanisms achieve computational efficiency, profitability, individual rationality, and truthfulness. Moreover, the designed mechanisms can satisfy the properties of non-monopoly and constant discount under certain conditions.