Group Buying Based Incentive Mechanism for Mobile Crowd Sensing

摘要

Mobile crowd sensing (MCS) has become a promising paradigm to perceive the environment with the help of smart phones. A monetary award is an effective method to incentivize participants to contribute good quality data. However, the reward for long-term data collection in the wide area could be unaffordable for a MCS requester. In this paper, we enable data requesters to recruit sensing workers in a group buying way. Requesters with similar data demand can form a group to share the payment and sensing data, which reduces cost and increases the coverage of sensing data. Agents from different groups compete in buying sensing data from sensing workers. We propose TGBA, a Two-phase Group Buying based Auction mechanism for MCS. In phase I, requesters submit bids to their group agent, the group agent decides the winners and clearing prices. In phase II, group agents attend the auction for recruiting workers. TGBA is computationally efficient and possesses good economic properties such as individual rationality, budget balance and truthfulness.