Mechanism Design for Wireless Powered Spatial Crowdsourcing Networks

Abstract: Wireless power transfer (WPT) is a promising technology to prolong the lifetime of the sensors and communication devices, i.e., workers, in completing crowdsourcing tasks by providing continuous and cost-effective energy supplies. In this paper, we propose a wireless powered spatial crowdsourcing framework which consists of two mutually dependent phases: task allocation phase and data crowdsourcing phase. In the task allocation phase, we propose a Stackelberg game based mechanism for the spatial crowdsourcing platform to efficiently allocate spatial tasks and wireless charging power to each worker. In the data crowdsourcing phase, the workers may have an incentive to misreport its real working location to improve its utility, which causes adverse effects to the spatial crowdsourcing platform. To address this issue, we present three strategyproof deployment mechanisms for the spatial crowdsourcing platform to place a mobile base station, e.g., vehicle or robot, which is responsible for transferring the wireless power and collecting the crowdsourced data. As the benchmark, we first apply the classical median mechanism and evaluate its worst-case performance. Then, we design a conventional strategyproof deployment mechanism to improve the expected utility of the spatial crowdsourcing platform under the condition that the workers' locations follow a known geographical distribution. For a more general case with only the historical location data available, we propose a deep learning based strategyproof deployment mechanism to maximize the spatial crowdsourcing platform's utility. Extensive experimental results based on synthetic and real-world datasets reveal the effectiveness of the proposed framework in allocating tasks and charging power to workers while avoiding the dishonest worker's manipulation.