When Crowdsourcing Meets Social IoT: An Efficient Privacy-Preserving Incentive Mechanism

Crowdsourcing is an effective paradigm in human centric computing for addressing problems by utilizing human computation power, especially in booming social Internet of Things (IoT). By leveraging mutual friendship between computing entities (i.e., workers), collaborative tasks can thus be routed and finally fulfilled by multihop friends with high expertise. However, crowdsourcing in social IoT may reveal the privacy of task requesters which results in a large dilemma. In this paper, we focus on designing a multihop routing incentive mechanism which can also preserve task requester’s privacy. Specifically, a utility maximization problem under privacy and budget feasibility constraints is formulated. Defining the conditions for privacy insurance, we give guidelines on how many subtasks should an entire task be divided into, and analyze the tradeoff between privacy and task accuracy. To enable efficient crowdsourcing task routing in social IoT, we first consider 1-hop myopic routing case and propose a near-optimal task assignment algorithm with 1/2 approximation ratio for an arbitrary prior knowledge. We further design multihop payment policy to establish an equilibrium where workers are motivated to forward subtasks to their friends with the best expertise. The extensive simulations validate that our mechanism achieves a high level of average information gain with modest privacy guarantee.