Collaborative Smartphone Sensing using Overlapping Coalition Formation Games

TL;DR

This paper proposes a novel cooperative framework using overlapping coalition formation games for smartphone sensing, improving data quality and system performance over traditional non-cooperative methods.

Contribution

It introduces an overlapping coalition formation game model for cooperative smartphone sensing, addressing incentive and resource allocation issues.

Findings

Cooperative approach outperforms non-cooperative in sensing quality.

Overlapping coalitions enhance resource sharing among users.

Simulation results validate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Abstract

With the rapid growth of sensor technology, smartphone sensing has become an effective approach to improve the quality of smartphone applications. However, due to time-varying wireless channels and lack of incentives for the users to participate, the quality and quantity of the data uploaded by the smartphone users are not always satisfying. In this paper, we consider a smartphone sensing system in which a platform publicizes multiple tasks, and the smartphone users choose a set of tasks to participate in. In the traditional non-cooperative approach with incentives, each smartphone user gets rewards from the platform as an independent individual and the limit of the wireless channel resources is often omitted. To tackle this problem, we introduce a novel cooperative approach with an overlapping coalition formation game (OCF-game) model, in which the smartphone users can cooperate with each other to form the overlapping coalitions for different sensing tasks. We also utilize a centralized case to describe the upper bound of the system sensing performance. Simulation results show that the cooperative approach achieves a better performance than the non-cooperative one in various situations.