Towards Truthful Mechanisms for Mobile Crowdsourcing with Dynamic Smartphones

Stimulating participation from smartphone users is of paramount importance to mobile crowdsourcing systems and applications. A few incentive mechanisms have been proposed, but most of them have made the impractical assumption that smartphones remain static in the system and sensing tasks are known in advance. The existing mechanisms fail when being applied to the realistic scenario where smartphones dynamically arrive to the system and sensing tasks are submitted at random. It is particularly challenging to design an incentive mechanism for such a mobile crowdsourcing system, given dynamic smartphones, uncertain arrivals of tasks, strategic behaviors, and private information of smartphones. We propose two truthful auction mechanisms for two different cases of mobile crowdsourcing with dynamic smartphones. For the offline case, we design an optimal truthful mechanism with an optimal task allocation algorithm of polynomial-time computation complexity of O(n+gamma)(3), where n is the number of smartphones and gamma is the number of sensing tasks. For the online case, we design a near-optimal truthful mechanism with an online task allocation algorithm that achieves a constant competitive ratio of 1/2. Rigorous theoretical analysis and extensive simulations have been performed, and the results demonstrate the proposed auction mechanisms achieve truthfulness, individual rationality, computational efficiency, and low overpayment.