mobile crowdsensing

IEEE Communications Magazine

An incentive mechanism is important for mobile crowdsensing to recruit sufficient participants to complete large-scale sensing tasks with high quality. Previous incentive mechanisms have focused on quantifying participants' contribution to the quality of sensing and provide incentives directly to them. In this article, we introduce a novel approach, called the social incentive mechanism, which, surprisingly, incentivizes the social friends of the participants who perform the sensing tasks. The basic idea is to leverage the social ties among participants to promote global cooperation. Since the incentive that a participant receives largely relies on the behaviors of his/her social friends, participants have the motivation to impact their friends' behaviors through their social relationships in order to gain a higher payoff. This approach is applicable to many scenarios where the contributions to the quality of sensing among participants are interdependent, such as data aggregation. We have provided a case study which shows that the social incentive mechanism is more cost-effective than traditional incentive mechanisms.&lt;br/&gt; &amp;copy; 1979-2012 IEEE.

Promoting Cooperation by the Social Incentive Mechanism in Mobile Crowdsensing