Title
Thanos: Incentive Mechanism with Quality Awareness for Mobile Crowd Sensing
Abstract
Recent years have witnessed the emergence of mobile crowd sensing (MCS) systems, which leverage the public crowd equipped with various mobile devices for large scale sensing tasks. In this paper, we study a critical problem in MCS systems, namely, incentivizing worker participation. Different from existing work, we propose an incentive framework for MCS systems, named Thanos, that incorporates a crucial metric, called workers’ quality of information (QoI). Due to various factors (e.g., sensor quality and environment noise), the quality of the sensory data contributed by individual workers varies significantly. Obtaining high quality data with little expense is always the ideal of MCS platforms. Technically, our design of Thanos is based on reverse combinatorial auctions. We investigate both the single- and multi-minded combinatorial auction models. For the former, we design a truthful, individual rational, and computationally efficient mechanism that ensures a close-to-optimal social welfare. For the latter, we design an iterative descending mechanism that satisfies individual rationality and computational efficiency, and approximately maximizes the social welfare with a guaranteed approximation ratio. Through extensive simulations, we validate our theoretical analysis on the various desirable properties guaranteed by Thanos.
Year
DOI
Venue
2019
10.1109/tmc.2018.2868106
IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing
Keywords
Field
DocType
Task analysis,Sensors,Air quality,Computational modeling,Mobile computing,Mobile handsets,Monitoring
Mobile computing,Rationality,Incentive,Task analysis,Computer science,Combinatorial auction,Mobile device,Social Welfare,Information quality,Distributed computing
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
18
8
1536-1233
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
3
0.37
0
Authors
6
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Haiming Jin110412.12
lu su2111866.61
Danyang Chen3844.63
Hongpeng Guo482.81
Klara Nahrstedt57941636.63
Jinhui Xu666578.86