A Distributed Auction Approach to Crowdsourced Sensing over Smartphones

Crowdsourcing distributed sensing to smartphones has become an appealing paradigm for harnessing the power of the crowd for collecting and sharing information. Market-driven auctions have been recognized as an effective way to matching sensing service demand and supply. A crowdsourcer acts as an auctioneer and smartphone workers act as bidders who are willing to supply sensing services to crowdsourcers. A number of auction mechanisms have been proposed. Unfortunately, most of them assume there is only one crowdsourcer, which is not true in the real world. In this paper, we consider the design of distributed auctions for a crowdsourced sensing market with multiple crowdsourcers and many smartphone workers. We employ a distributed reverse auction that works in a fully distributed fashion. The mechanism requires no one to release its private information. With extensive simulations, we demonstrate that our distributed mechanism achieves the optimal social welfare, and produces better performance than a competing algorithm.