Truthful mobile crowd sensing with interdependent valuations

Abstract

Mobile crowd sensing (MCS) has been used to enable a wide range of resource-discovery applications by exploiting the "wisdom" of many mobile users. However, in many applications, a user's valuation depends on other users' sensory data, which introduces the problem of interdependent valuations. This feature can encourage sensory data misreport, hence makes economic mechanisms challenging. While some work has been done to address this problem, the issues of private utility information and communication overheads remain unsolved. In this study, we formulate the first interdependent-valuation model for the resource-discovery MCS systems, aiming to elicit truthful sensory reports and utility information and to maximize expected social welfare. We design a Truthful Sense-And-Bid (T-SAB) Mechanism based on surrogate functions, which can reveal marginal utility information by only requiring each user to submit one-dimensional signaling per resource. We show that the surrogate function and a reward function can limit users' willingness to misreport, when users have small informational sizes, a reasonable condition in large-scale MCS systems. Consequently, our T-SAB Mechanism yields a Perfect Bayesian Equilibrium (PBE) with the efficient allocation outcome, approximate truthfulness, individual rationality, and approximate budget balance. To illustrate the effectiveness of the T-SAB Mechanism, we perform a case study of a cognitive radio network. We demonstrate that the social welfare gain of the T-SAB Mechanism can achieve up to 20% social welfare gain comparing with a benchmark.