Accelerating Stable Matching between Workers and Spatial-Temporal Tasks for Dynamic MCS: A Stagewise Service Trading Approach

Abstract: Designing proper incentives in mobile crowdsensing (MCS) networks represents a critical mechanism in engaging distributed mobile users (workers) to contribute heterogeneous data for diverse applications (tasks). We develop a novel stagewise trading framework to reach efficient and stable matching between tasks and workers, upon considering the diversity of tasks and the dynamism of MCS networks. This framework integrates futures and spot trading stages, where in the former, we propose futures trading-driven stable matching and pre-path-planning (FT-SMP$^3$) for long-term task-worker assignment and pre-planning of workers' paths based on historical statistics and risk analysis. While in the latter, we investigate spot trading-driven DQN path planning and onsite worker recruitment (ST-DP$^2$WR) mechanism to enhance workers' and tasks' practical utilities by facilitating temporary worker recruitment. We prove that our proposed mechanisms support crucial properties such as stability, individual rationality, competitive equilibrium, and weak Pareto optimality theoretically. Also, comprehensive evaluations confirm the satisfaction of these properties in practical network settings, demonstrating our commendable performance in terms of service quality, running time, and decision-making overheads.