A socially-aware incentive scheme for social participatory sensing

The main idea behind social participatory sensing is to leverage social friends as crowd workers to participate in mobile sensing tasks. A main challenge, however, is the recruitment of sufficient number of well-suited participants. Contributing sensing data requires time and monetary cost and may potentially impose privacy risks. This may lead to the unwillingness of the participants to contribute without obtaining explicit incentives. In this paper, we propose an incentive scheme for social participatory sensing. The goal is to address the participation insufficiency by allocating rewards to contributors, hence attracting greater number of suitable participants. Specifically, the scheme first identifies a set of candidates as potential participants based on certain suitability factors such as expertise, reputation, pairwise privacy, etc. It then selects the most suitable participants considering their desired bids and the task budget. Once their contributions are delivered, participants are rewarded. The reward allocated to a participant depends on the quality of his own contribution as well as the contributions made by his social friends (who are motivated to participate by him). This is shown to be effective in attracting a greater amount of participation since it encourages participants to invite their friends in order to receive more reward. Simulation results demonstrate the efficacy of our proposed incentive scheme in terms of selecting sufficient number of well-suited participants.