A Truthful Auction Mechanism for Mobile Crowd Sensing With Budget Constraint

The selfishness and randomness of users in the mobile crowd sensing network could cause them unwilling to participate in sensing activities and lead to lower completion rates of sensing tasks. In order to deal with these problems, this paper proposes a novel incentive mechanism based on a new auction model for mobile crowd sensing, which consists of two consecutive stages. In the first stage, a novel Incentive Method based on Reverse Auction for Location-aware sensing (IMRAL) is proposed to maximize user utility. By introducing a task-centric method to determine the winning bids, it can provide higher user utility and higher task coverage ratio. To ensure the truthfulness of IMRAL, we design a unique payment determination algorithm based on critical payment for the incentive platform. In the second stage, we propose a user-interaction incentive model (UIBIM) to cover the situation that a user may drop out of the sensing activity. This new incentive model includes a dynamic double auction framework prompting users' interaction and a user matching algorithm based on a bipartite graph. The proposed new mechanism achieves the goal of improving task completion rates without increasing the cost of the incentive platform. The simulation results show that comparing with other solutions, such as a truthful auction for location-aware collaborative sensing in mobile crowdsourcing and incentive mechanism for crowdsourcing in the single-requester single-bid-model, IMRAL can achieve better performance in terms of average user utility and tasks coverage ratio, and the UIBIM can significantly improve task completion rates.