How Much Should I Pay for Privacy Concerns in Truthful Online Crowd Sensing? (1310.7452v5)

Abstract: Crowd sensing is a new paradigm which leverages the pervasive smartphones to efficiently collect sensing data, enabling numerous novel applications. To achieve good service quality for a crowd sensing application, incentive mechanisms are indispensable to attract more user participation. Most of existing mechanisms only apply for the offline scenario, where the system has full information about the users' sensing profiles, i.e., a set of locations or mobility as well as the type of smartphones used, and their true costs. On the contrary, we focus on a more real scenario where users with their own privacy concerns arrive one by one online in a random order. We model the problem as a privacy-respecting online auction in which users are willing to negotiate access to certain private information and submit their sensing profiles satisfying privacy concerns to the platform (the provider of crowd sensing applications) over time, and the platform aims to the total total value of the services provided by selected users under a budget constraint. We then design two online mechanisms for a budgeted crowd sensing application, satisfying the computational efficiency, individual rationality, budget feasibility, truthfulness, consumer sovereignty, constant competitiveness and privacy concerns. Through extensive simulations, we evaluate the performance and validate the theoretical properties of our online mechanisms.