An UAV-based incentive mechanism for Crowdsensing with budget constraints

Monitoring environmental variables in lower layers of the atmosphere is an important activity to measure changes that result from natural events, and human interventions. Volcano eruptions, commercial aviation, and the massive spread of pesticides using light aircraft are just some examples of low layer atmosphere polluters. Twice a day, every day of the year, weather balloons are released simultaneously from almost 900 locations worldwide to monitor environmental variables. The flight of these synthetic rubber balloons last for around 2 hours, then they become pollution too. Recent advances in small unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) with built in sensors, and their emerging role in business supply chain make UAVs ideal participants for environmental monitoring. In this paper, we present an incentive mechanism for UAV-Crowdsensing. The core of the proposed mechanism consists of a recurrent reverse action and a recruitment model. By these two components, the system encourages UAVs sensing from locations that maximize volume coverage within a given budget. Through extensive simulations, we evaluate the performance of the proposed incentive mechanism.