Community-Based Task Assignment Method in Mobile Crowd Sensing

With the rapid development of mobile networks and widespread use of mobile devices, there is an increasing focus on assigning location-based tasks to mobile users in the context of Mobile Crowd Sensing (MCS). One of the primary challenges in MCS is task assignment, i.e., distributing tasks to suitable users for completion. However, existing work often assumes static offline scenarios where the spatiotemporal information of all users and tasks is pre-determined and known. Neglecting the dynamic spatiotemporal distribution of users and tasks can lead to suboptimal assignment results. In this study, we investigate a novel task assignment problem called Community Task Assignment (CTA). The objective is to enhance the effectiveness and precision of task distribution by considering the sociality of current users and distributing location-based tasks through communities. Initially, we partition users into different communities by abstracting and identifying behavior patterns through the computation of minimum spanning trees, connectivity parameters, and community cohesion. Subsequently, we calculate the match between perception tasks and community behavior pattern features, and task distribution is carried out by the central nodes of the communities based on this match. Experimental validation first confirms the effectiveness of the community partitioning algorithm. Compared to existing algorithms, the proposed method more accurately detects community structures with similar behavioral features in the network. Furthermore, a comparison with existing task assignment algorithms verifies the superiority of the proposed method in terms of average task completion time, task matching rate, and overall utility of task assignments.