Price Learning-based Incentive Mechanism for Mobile Crowd Sensing

Mobile crowd sensing (MCS) is an emerging sensing paradigm that can be applied to build various smart city and IoT applications. In an MCS application, the participation level of mobile users plays an essential role. Thus a great many incentive mechanisms have been proposed to motivate users. However, most of these works focus on the bidding behavior of users and overlook the feature of task requesters. Specifically, there exists a disparity between the low payment a requester would like to make and the high reward a user would like to receive. In this work, we address this issue by designing a group-buying-based online incentive mechanism, which contains two stages: In Stage I, a price learning algorithm is designed to select winning tasks for each group of sensing tasks and obtain a competitive total budget for recruiting users. In Stage II, an online auction is conducted between group agents and online users before a given recruitment deadline. Through theoretical analysis and extensive evaluations, we show that the proposed mechanisms possess computational efficiency, individual rationality, budget balance, truthfulness, and good performance.