Optimal Mobile Crowdsensing Incentive Under Sensing Inaccuracy

Due to the pervasive adoption of sensor-embedded mobile devices yet increasing demand on data and computing resources, mobile crowdsensing is a promising paradigm with rapid growth. One of the most challenging issues is how to maximize the utilities of crowdsensing platforms under inaccurate distributed sensing. The nature of such inaccuracy is due to the fact that energy-based sensing can be greatly impacted by thermal and environmental noise, which significantly affects task allocation strategies of crowdsensing platforms. Because of the allocation efficiency and fairness concerns, auction-based mechanisms have been extensively used in crowdsensing systems. However, the existing auction-based mechanisms for crowdsensing do not take sensing inaccuracy into consideration, while guaranteeing that each participator obtains her maximal utility by bidding with her true cost for tasks. To tackle this issue, in this article, we propose OSIER, an optimal mobile crowdsensing incentive under sensing inaccuracy. Specifically, a quantitative analytical framework on characterizing the impact of sensing inaccuracy on a crowdsensing platform is presented, and an optimization problem involving sensing inaccuracy is solved to achieve a maximum utility of the platform. Furthermore, depending on whether a user needs to perform all tasks simultaneously or not, indivisible tasks and divisible tasks are discussed, and OSIER-I and OSIER-D are presented for these two kinds of tasks. Simulation results verify the truthfulness of OSIER, and given a sample set with 5%–20% noise in spectrum sensing, OSIER can achieve 10% higher utilities than the existing crowdsensing mechanisms on average.