Jump-start crowdsensing: A three-layer incentive framework for mobile crowdsensing

Abstract

In the past decade, with the rapid development of wireless communication and sensor technology, ubiquitous smartphones equipped with increasingly rich sensors have more powerful computing and sensing abilities. Thus, mobile crowdsensing has received extensive attentions from both industry and academia. Recently, plenty of mobile crowdsensing applications come forth, such as indoor positioning, environment monitoring, transportation, and so on. However, most existing mobile crowdsensing systems lack of vast user bases, and thus urgently need appropriate incentive mechanisms to attract mobile users to guarantee the service quality. In this paper, we propose to incorporate sensing platform and social network applications, which already have large user bases to build a three-layer network model. Thus, we can publicize the sensing platform promptly in large scale, and provide long-term guarantee of data sources. Based on a three-layer network model, we design incentive mechanisms for both intermediaries and the crowdsensing platform, and provide a solution to cope with the problem of user overlapping among intermediaries. We indicate the properties of our proposed incentive mechanisms, including incentive compatibility, individual rationality, and efficiency.