Synergistic based social incentive mechanism in mobile crowdsensing

Abstract

Most Mobile Crowdsensing (MCS) applications are large-scale and the quality of sensing for sensing tasks is interdependent. Previous incentive mechanisms have focused on quantifying participants’ contribution to the quality of sensing and provide incentives directly to them, which are not applicable to the above scenario. To tackle this problem, in this article, we introduce a novel approach for MCS, called the synergistic based social incentive mechanism. The basic idea is to leverage the social ties among participants to promote cooperation. To maximize the utility of service provider, a moral hazard model is used to analyze the optimal contract between service providers and mobile users in the case of asymmetric information. Experiments show that the synergistic based social incentive mechanism can give users continuous encouragement while maximizing the utility of the principal.