A Task-Centric Cooperative Sensing Scheme for Mobile Crowdsourcing Systems

In a densely distributed mobile crowdsourcing system, data collected by neighboring participants often exhibit strong spatial correlations. By exploiting this property, one may employ a portion of the users as active participants and set the other users as idling ones without compromising the quality of sensing or the connectivity of the network. In this work, two participant selection questions are considered: (a) how to recruit an optimal number of users as active participants to guarantee that the overall sensing data integrity is kept above a preset threshold; and (b) how to recruit an optimal number of participants with some inaccurate data so that the fairness of selection and resource conservation can be achieved while maintaining sufficient sensing data integrity. For question (a), we propose a novel task-centric approach to explicitly exploit data correlation among participants. This subset selection problem is regarded as a constrained optimization problem and we propose an efficient polynomial time algorithm to solve it. For question (b), we formulate this set partitioning problem as a constrained min-max optimization problem. A solution using an improved version of the polynomial time algorithm is proposed based on (a). We validate these algorithms using a publicly available Intel-Berkeley lab sensing dataset and satisfactory performance is achieved.