Sell your experiences: a market mechanism based incentive for participatory sensing

Abstract

This paper studies economic models of user participation incentive in participatory sensing applications. User participation is the most important element in participatory sensing applications for providing adequate level of service quality. However, incentive mechanism and its economic model for user participation have never been addressed so far in this research domain. In order to stimulate user participation, we design and evaluate a novel Reverse Auction based Dynamic Price (RADP) incentive mechanism, where users can sell their sensing data to a service provider with users' claimed bid prices. The proposed incentive mechanism focuses on minimizing and stabilizing incentive cost while maintaining adequate number of participants by preventing users from dropping out of participatory sensing applications. Compared with a Random Selection with Fixed Price (RSFP) incentive mechanism, the proposed mechanism not only reduces the incentive cost for retaining same number of participants by more than 60% but also improves the fairness of incentive distribution and social welfare. More importantly, RADP can remove burden of accurate pricing for user sensing data, the most difficult step in RSFP.