Predictive Location Aware Online Admission and Selection Control in Participatory Sensing

Abstract

Participatory sensing is a crowdsourcing-based framework, where the platform executes the sensing requests with the help of many common peoples’ handheld devices (typically smartphones). In this paper, we mainly address the online sensing request admission and smartphone selection problem to maximize the profit of the platform, taking into account the queue backlog, and the location of sensing requests and smartphones. First, we formulate this problem as a discrete time model and design a location aware online admission and selection control algorithm (LAAS) based on the Lyapunov optimization technique. The LAAS algorithm only depends on the currently available information and makes all the control decisions independently and simultaneously. Next, we utilize the recent advancement of the accurate prediction of smartphones’ mobility and sensing request arrival information in the next few time slots and develop a predictive location aware admission and selection control algorithm (PLAAS). We further design a greedy predictive location aware admission and selection control algorithm (GPLAAS) to achieve the online implementation of PLAAS approximately and iteratively. Theoretical analysis shows that under any control parameter V > 0, both LAAS and PLAAS algorithm can achieve O (1/ V )-optimal average profit, while the sensing request backlog is bounded by O ( V ). Extensive numerical results based on both synthetic and real trace show that LAAS outperforms the Greedy algorithm and Random algorithm and GPLAAS improves the profit-backlog tradeoff over LAAS.