IntelligentCrowd: Mobile Crowdsensing via Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

Abstract

The prosperity of smart mobile devices has made mobile crowdsensing (MCS) a promising paradigm for completing complex sensing and computation tasks. In the past, great efforts have been made on the design of incentive mechanisms and task allocation strategies from MCS platform's perspective to motivate mobile users’ participation. However, in practice, MCS participants face many uncertainties coming from their sensing environment as well as other participants’ strategies, and how do they interact with each other and make sensing decisions is not well understood. In this paper, we take MCS participants’ perspectives to derive an online sensing policy to maximize their payoffs via MCS participation. Specifically, we model the interactions of mobile users and sensing environments as a multi-agent Markov decision process. Each participant cannot observe others’ decisions, but needs to decide her effort level in sensing tasks only based on local information, e.g., her own record of sensed signals’ quality. To cope with the stochastic sensing environment, we develop an intelligent crowdsensing algorithm <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">IntelligentCrowd</i> by leveraging the power of multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL). Our algorithm leads to the optimal sensing policy for each user to maximize the expected payoff against stochastic sensing environments, and can be implemented at the individual participant's level in a distributed fashion. Numerical simulations demonstrate that <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">IntelligentCrowd</i> significantly improves users’ payoffs in sequential MCS tasks under various sensing dynamics.