Frugal incentive mechanism in periodic mobile crowdsensing

Abstract

Nowadays, numerous incentive mechanisms of mobile crowdsensing have been designed to attract extensive user participation, but most of these mechanisms focus only on independent task scenarios, where the sensing tasks are independent of each other. On the contrary, we focus on a periodical task scenario, where each user participates in the same type of sensing tasks periodically. In this paper, we consider the long-term user participation incentive in a general periodical mobile crowdsensing system from a frugality payment perspective. We explore the issue under both semi-online (the intraperiod interactive process is synchronous while the interperiod interactive process is sequential and asynchronous during each period) and online user arrival models (the previous 2 interactive processes are sequential and asynchronous). In particular, we first propose a semi-online frugal incentive mechanism by introducing a Lyapunov method. Moreover, we also extend it to an online frugal incentive mechanism, which satisfies the long-term participation constraint and approximate optimality. Finally, extensive simulations show that our mechanisms satisfy the above theoretical properties. KEYWORDSfrugal payment, long-term incentive, periodical crowdsensing, submodular function Int J Commun Syst. 2018;31:e3493.wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/dac