Privacy-Preserving User Recruitment Protocol for Mobile Crowdsensing

Abstract

Mobile crowdsensing is a new paradigm in which a requester can recruit a group of mobile users via a platform and coordinate them to perform some sensing tasks by using their smartphones. In mobile crowdsensing, each user might perform multiple tasks with different sensing qualities. Meanwhile, the users participating in the crowdsensing will ask for sufficient rewards to compensate for their expenditures. Hence, an important problem is how to recruit the users with minimum cost while achieving a satisfactory sensing quality for each task. Furthermore, in order to ease users’ worries about privacy disclosures, the user recruitment process needs to protect each user’s sensing quality and recruitment cost information from being revealed to other users or to the platform. In this paper, we propose two secure user recruitment problems for the cases where the recruitment costs of users are homogeneous and heterogeneous. After proving the NP-hardness of the problems, we design two secure user recruitment protocols by using secret sharing scheme. Both of the proposed protocols adopt greedy strategies, which can recruit nearly optimal users while ensuring that the total sensing quality of each task is no less than a given threshold. The difference lies in that the two greedy strategies are based on two unique utility functions. We analyze the approximation ratios of the two protocols and prove the security under the semi-honest model. Finally, we demonstrate the significant performance of the proposed protocols through extensive simulations and executions on real smartphones.