QuaCentive: a quality-aware incentive mechanism in mobile crowdsourced sensing (MCS)

Today’s smartphones with a rich set of cheap powerful embedded sensors can offer a variety of novel and efficient ways to opportunistically collect data, and enable numerous mobile crowdsourced sensing (MCS) applications. Basically, incentive is one of fundamental issues in MCS. Through appropriately integrating three popular incentive methods: reverse auction, reputation and gamification, this paper proposes a quality-aware incentive framework for MCS, QuaCentive, which, pertaining to all components in MCS, can motivate crowd to provide high-quality sensed contents, stimulate crowdsourcers to give truthful feedback about quality of sensed contents, and make platform profitable. Specifically, first, we utilize the reverse auction and reputation mechanisms to incentivize crowd to truthfully bid for sensing tasks, and then provide high-quality sensed contents. Second, in to encourage crowdsourcers to provide truthful feedbacks about quality of sensed data, in QuaCentive, the verification of those feedbacks are crowdsourced in gamification way. Finally, we theoretically illustrate that QuaCentive satisfies the following properties: individual rationality, cost-truthfulness for crowd, feedback-truthfulness for crowdsourcers, platform profitability.