An Game Theory Based Online Incentive Mechanism for Participatory Sensing

Participatory sensing is a new paradigm which takes advantage of pervasive devices to efficiently collect data and has shown its great potential in various applications. To achieve good service quality for a participatory sensing application, incentive mechanisms are necessary to attract enough participants. Most existing mechanisms mainly apply for the offline scenario where all users report their strategic types in advance. On the contrary, we focus on a more realistic scenario where users arrive online in a random order and design an online incentive mechanism based on cooperation game theory. First, we analyze the profits of participants and publisher. Then, a cooperation game model is provided, this model takes privacy, reputation and power state into consideration, aims at maximizing both the profits of participants and publisher at the same time. Through solving the model, we can get the online incentive strategy. At last, we evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed online incentive mechanisms, the results showed that our strategy has an excellent performance.