MWRS: A MAB-Based Worker Recruitment Scheme With Tripartite Stackelberg Game for Reliable Mobile Crowdsensing

Abstract

Mobile Crowdsensing (MCS) has emerged as a compelling paradigm for data sensing and collection, leveraging the widespread adoption of mobile devices and the active participation of numerous users. Despite its potential, MCS faces critical challenges, particularly in recruiting reliable workers and acquiring high-quality sensing data. Most existing approaches assume prior information on worker quality and are vulnerable to collusion attacks, especially having not comprehensively considered workers’ reliability and stability. To address these problems, we propose a Multi-Armed Bandit (MAB) based Worker Recruitment Scheme (MWRS) integrated with the Tripartite Stackelberg Game (TSG) for MCS. Specifically, a trust evaluation and truth inference mechanism is introduced to assess the trustworthiness of workers through active truth detection. To enhance recruitment quality, we employ a trust-aware worker selection mechanism that utilizes a modified Upper Confidence Bound (UCB) algorithm, achieving an optimal balance between exploration and exploitation. Furthermore, the interactions among participants are modeled using a TSG framework, which formulates their respective payoffs to determine optimal decision-making strategies, thus achieving mutually beneficial outcomes. Extensive evaluations on real-world datasets demonstrate that our proposed scheme improves total quality by up to 30.8% and reduces regret by up to 80.3% compared to existing methods.