A reverse auction based incentive mechanism for mobile crowdsensing

Incentive mechanism design is a critical issue in mobile crowdsensing and a lot of work has been carried out. However, existing mechanisms in this area generally lack of consideration of individual worker/candidate's (potential) contribution to the system when recruiting new workers or when detaining existing workers. In this paper, we design a reverse auction based incentive mechanism. The design objective is to maximally reduce the system maintenance cost (including auction cost and recruitment cost) by optimizing the composition of workers in the system. For this purpose, in the recruiting process, candidates are queried in the descending order of their potential contributions to the system, while in the detaining process, likely-dropping-out workers are rewarded with inner lottery whose amount is adjusted based on their usefulness to the system. In the auction process, prices are calculated based on workers' bids and also their usefulness to the system. We present detailed mechanism design. Simulation results show that our mechanism outperforms existing work.