A spatio-temporal incentive scheme with consumer demand awareness for participatory sensing

Participatory sensing facilitates smartphone users to contribute data to form a body of knowledge. A significant issue which determines the success of participatory sensing is the incentive for contributors. In this paper, we propose a spatio-temporal incentive scheme with consumer demand awareness for participatory sensing. The proposed incentive scheme incentivizes the contributors according to the consumer demand considering the spatio-temporal relevance between contributors and consumers. According to the incentive scheme, contributors and consumers determine their participation levels respectively to maximize their utilities, and a resulting market equilibrium has been achieved where the optimal contribution rate and the optimal consumption rate are employed. The performance of the proposed incentive scheme is investigated through extensive simulations, which show an improved coverage and quality of consumption.