Design of a local information incentive mechanism for mobile crowdsensing

Abstract

The world of telecommunications has seen the growing popularity of mobile devices and its massive technological advancements and innovations (e.g., smartphones, smart watches, among others). One critical particularity is that these devices have a series of built-in sensors and continuous network connectivity. Therefore, they present a great opportunity to perform large-scale sensing of different activities in the physical world. This new sensor application, better known as Mobile crowd-sensing (MCS), has lately become a focus of research. One of the challenges when developing a MCS-based network is to attract and convince users to participate. In this paper, we present a framework for MCS that includes a model to represent the behavior of the users and a novel incentive mechanism. The model aims to characterize the behavior of users considering the availability of their resources and the non-homogeneity of their responses. The incentive mechanism proposed assigns different values of incentives and in it the users only consider their local information to decide their participation in the framework. The performance of the proposed framework is evaluated through simulations. The results allow us to prove the uncertainty of participation of the users and that they react in different ways to the incentives offered. They also prove that the incentive mechanism estimates satisfactorily the type of users and the incentive that will be offered to each user. In addition, we show the advantages of an incentive mechanism that considers different values of payments.