QUAD: A Quality Aware Multi-Unit Double Auction Framework for IoT-Based Mobile Crowdsensing in Strategic Setting

Abstract

Crowdsourcing with the intelligent agents carrying smart devices is becoming increasingly popular in recent years. It has opened up meeting an extensive list of real life applications such as measuring air pollution level, road traffic information, and so on. In literature this is known as mobile crowdsourcing or mobile crowdsensing. In this paper, the discussed set-up consists of multiple task requesters (or task providers) and multiple IoT devices (as task executors), where each of the task providers is having multiple homogeneous sensing tasks. Each of the task requesters report bid along with the number of homogeneous sensing tasks to the platform. On the other side, we have multiple IoT devices that reports the ask (charge for imparting its services) and the number of sensing tasks that it can execute. The valuations of task requesters and IoT devices are private information, and both might act strategically. One assumption that is made in this paper is that the bids and asks of the agents (task providers and IoT devices) follow decreasing marginal returns criteria. In this paper, a truthful mechanism is proposed for allocating the IoT devices to the sensing tasks carried by task requesters, that also keeps into account the quality of IoT devices. The mechanism is truthful, budget balance, individual rational, computationally efficient, and prior-free. The simulations are carried out to measure the performance of the proposed mechanism against the benchmark mechanisms. The code and the synthetic data are available at https://github.com/Samhitha-Jasti/QUAD-Implementation.