Truthful Incentive Mechanism for Mobile Crowdsensing with Smart Consumer Devices

Abstract

Smart consumer devices have become one of the fundamental communication and computing devices in people's everyday lives over the past decade. Their various sensors and wireless connectivity have paved the way for a new application area called mobile crowdsensing (MCS) where sensing services are provided by using the sensor outputs collected from smart consumer devices. MCS system's service quality heavily depends on the participation of smart device users who probably expect to be compensated in return for their participation. Therefore, MCS applications need incentive mechanisms to motivate such people into participating. In this work, we first defined a reverse auction based incentive mechanism for a representative MCS system. Then, we integrated the Vickrey-Clarke-Groves (VCG) mechanism into the initial incentive mechanism so that truthful bidding would become the dominant strategy in the resulting incentive mechanism. Finally, we conducted simulations of both incentive mechanisms in order to measure the fairness of service prices and the fairness of cumulative participant earnings using Jain's fairness index. We observed that both the fairness of service prices and the fairness of cumulative participant earnings were generally better in the derived incentive mechanism when the VCG mechanism was applicable. We also found that at least 70% of service requests had fair prices, while between 5% and 85% of participants had fair cumulative earnings in both incentive mechanisms.