Towards Profit Optimization During Online Participant Selection in Compressive Mobile Crowdsensing

A mobile crowdsensing (MCS) platform motivates employing participants from the crowd to complete sensing tasks. A crucial problem is to maximize the profit of the platform, i.e., the charge of a sensing task minus the payments to participants that execute the task. In this article, we improve the profit via the data reconstruction method, which brings new challenges, because it is hard to predict the reconstruction quality due to the dynamic features and mobility of participants. In particular, two Profit-driven Online Participant Selection (POPS) problems under different situations are studied in our work: (1) for S-POPS, the sensing cost of the different parts within the target area is the Same. Two mechanisms are designed to tackle this problem, including the ProSC and ProSC+. An exponential-based quality estimation method and a repetitive cross-validation algorithm are combined in the former mechanism, and the spatial distribution of selected participants are further discussed in the latter mechanism; (2) for V-POPS, the sensing cost of different parts within the target area is Various, which makes it the NP-hard problem. A heuristic mechanism called ProSCx is proposed to solve this problem, where the searching space is narrowed and both the participant quantity and distribution are optimized in each slot. Finally, we conduct comprehensive evaluations based on the real-world datasets. The experimental results demonstrate that our proposed mechanisms are more effective and efficient than baselines, selecting the participants with a larger profit for the platform.