A location-based incentive mechanism for participatory sensing systems with budget constraints

Abstract

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I take this opportunity to express my sincere thanks to Dr. Miguel Labrador, for giving me this wonderful opportunity of working on this project. I am also grateful to him for his extended support and guidance throughout the course of this work, and for making my study at USF a pleasant and exciting educational experience. My sincere thanks to Dr. Sarkar and Dr. Moreno, for being in my committee and for their valuable comments and suggestions.It takes more than words to express my thanks to my family for their constant motivation and support, without which this work would not have been possible. I thank all my friends for their continuous encouragement and support.ABSTRACT v CHAPTER 1 iv ABSTRACT Participatory Sensing (PS) systems rely on the willingness of mobile users to participate in the collection and reporting of data using a variety of sensors either embedded or integrated in their cellular phones. Users agree to use their cellular phone resources to sense and transmit the data of interest because these data will be used to address a collective problem that otherwise would be very difficult to assess and solve. However, this new data collection paradigm has not been very successful yet mainly because of the lack of incentives for participation and privacy concerns.Without adequate incentive and privacy guaranteeing mechanisms most users will not be willing to participate. This thesis concentrates on incentive mechanisms for user participation in PS system.Although several schemes have been proposed thus far, none has used location information and imposed budget and coverage constraints, which will make the scheme more realistic and efficient.A recurrent reverse auction incentive mechanism with a greedy algorithm that selects a representative subset of the users according to their location given a fixed budget is proposed. Compared to existing mechanisms, GIA (i.e., Greedy Incentive Algorithm) improves the area covered by more than 60 percent acquiring a more representative set of samples after every round, i.e., reduces the collection of unnecessary (redundant) data, while maintaining the same number of active users in the system and spending the same budget.v CHAPTER 1

A Time and Location Correlation Incentive Scheme for Deep Data Gathering in Crowdsourcing Networks

“…It shows that the dynamic price incentive mechanism can reduce the incentive cost compared with the fixed price. Another reverse auction-based incentive mechanism was designed by Jaimes et al [47] which considers the locations of the users, the budget constraints, and the sensed coverage. Their incentive schemes can improve the covered area.…”

A Privacy-Preserving Incentive Mechanism for Participatory Sensing Systems

“…However, it cannot apply to most situations for the incentives are often too few for users. Most participatory users move according to the intended purpose, rather than depending on the incentive situation to determine the direction of the next movement [5,7].…”

“…A user may not be interested in the task, unless he receives a satisfactory reward to compensate for his resource consumption and potential privacy breach. Therefore, incentive mechanisms have been proposed to attract adequate participants [5][6][7].…”

Adopting incentive mechanisms for large-scale participation in mobile crowdsensing: from literature review to a conceptual framework

“…Behavioural-aware incentive policy rewards participants based on historical records of their trustworthiness and commitment to the crowdsensing initiative [68]. Location-aware incentive policy selects participants by virtue of their locations or rewards participant's effort according to the cost associated with the given location where data is captured while mobility-aware incentive policy rewards participant's effort according to the frequency with which the user moves around the area of interest to capture data [68,70]. Thrifty incentive policy aims at rewarding participants in such a way that ensures available budget is used prudently and resourcefully.…”