Privacy-Aware Sensing-Quality-Based Budget Feasible Incentive Mechanism for Crowdsourcing Fingerprint Collection

Mobile crowdsourcing (MCS) has shown great potential in received signal strength (RSS) fingerprint collection, in which an incentive mechanism plays a critical role to motivate users’ participation. However, how to quantify the quality of the gathered fingerprint data is still not addressed well in the design of incentive mechanism for MCS-based fingerprint collection. In this paper, a sensing quality metric is proposed to characterize the joint impact of users’ privacy protection and the spatial coverage of the submitted data. Given a limited budget, a basic incentive mechanism is devised to recruit appropriate users to maximize sensing quality. Considering that the cost of each user is regarded as private information and users may be attempted to misreport their costs to increase the revenue. Hence, an auction-based incentive mechanism is proposed to achieve the truthfulness of users’ costs, which is truthful, individually rational, computationally efficient and budget feasible. Simulation results show that our proposed schemes outperform the baseline schemes and the experiment with real-world data is carried out to evaluate the performance of our proposed basic incentive mechanism.