Free Market of Crowdsourcing: Incentive Mechanism Design for Mobile Sensing

Off-the-shelf smartphones have boosted large scale participatory sensing applications as they are equipped with various functional sensors, possess powerful computation and communication capabilities, and proliferate at a breathtaking pace. Yet the low participation level of smartphone users due to various resource consumptions, such as time and power, remains a hurdle that prevents the enjoyment brought by sensing applications. Recently, some researchers have done pioneer works in motivating users to contribute their resources by designing incentive mechanisms, which are able to provide certain rewards for participation. However, none of these works considered smartphone users' nature of opportunistically occurring in the area of interest. Specifically, for a general smartphone sensing application, the platform would distribute tasks to each user on her arrival and has to make an immediate decision according to the user's reply. To accommodate this general setting, we design three online incentive mechanisms, named TBA, TOIM and TOIM-AD, based on online reverse auction. TBA is designed to pursue platform utility maximization, while TOIM and TOIM-AD achieve the crucial property of truthfulness. All mechanisms possess the desired properties of computational efficiency, individual rationality, and profitability. Besides, they are highly competitive compared to the optimal offline solution. The extensive simulation results reveal the impact of the key parameters and show good approximation to the state-of-the-art offline mechanism.