Participation and reporting in participatory sensing

In participatory sensing (PS), users use smartphones to collect information related to a certain phenomenon of interest, and report their sensed data to the service provider through cellular or Wi-Fi networks. Previous studies on the incentive mechanism design for user participation often neglect the details of data reporting, which is non-trivial given the user mobility, location-dependent network availability, and transmission cost. In this paper, we study the decisions of the service provider and the users in PS applications that involve photo or video transmissions, where the reporting cost through the cellular network is non-negligible. The service provider uses a deadline reward scheme to motivate users to participate, and optimizes its reward to maximize its expected surplus. Users make their participation and reporting decisions based on the reward announced by the service provider. We jointly consider the user mobility and multiple access methods with different transmission costs and location heterogeneity in the problem formulation and analysis. For the general case with a time-discounted reward, we formulate a user's reporting decision problem as a sequential decision problem, and propose an optimal participation and reporting decisions (OPRD) algorithm using dynamic programming. For the special case with a fixed reward, we derive the closed-form participation and reporting decisions. Simulation results show that the OPRD algorithm improves the user payoff over the patient and impatient schemes by 9.8% and 13.2%, respectively.