Providing Long-Term Participation Incentive in Participatory Sensing

TL;DR

This paper introduces a Lyapunov-based VCG auction policy for sensor selection in participatory sensing systems, effectively incentivizing long-term user participation and outperforming existing methods in participation and social welfare.

Contribution

It proposes a novel online sensor selection policy that guarantees near-optimal long-term participation incentives without requiring future information.

Findings

Reduces user dropping probability by 25% to 90%.

Increases social welfare by 15% to 80%.

Outperforms state-of-the-art policies in simulations.

Abstract

Providing an adequate long-term participation incentive is important for a participatory sensing system to maintain enough number of active users (sensors), so as to collect a sufficient number of data samples and support a desired level of service quality. In this work, we consider the sensor selection problem in a general time-dependent and location-aware participatory sensing system, taking the long-term user participation incentive into explicit consideration. We study the problem systematically under different information scenarios, regarding both future information and current information (realization). In particular, we propose a Lyapunov-based VCG auction policy for the on-line sensor selection, which converges asymptotically to the optimal off-line benchmark performance, even with no future information and under (current) information asymmetry. Extensive numerical results show that our proposed policy outperforms the state-of-art policies in the literature, in terms of both user participation (e.g., reducing the user dropping probability by 25% to 90%) and social performance (e.g., increasing the social welfare by 15% to 80%).