SPARC: Strategy-Proof Double Auction for Mobile Participatory Sensing

Mobile participatory sensing with smartphones advocates the cooperative effort of mobile smartphones to perform a joint distributed sensing task, which has gained growing importance for its potential to support various types of large-scale sensing applications. In this paper, we seek to address the problem of incentive mechanism design for both multiple sensing tasks and smartphone users for participatory sensing applications. We first model the problem of mobile participatory sensing as a double auction, and propose a polynomial time sensing resource allocation and charging algorithm, which achieves good performance. Our theoretical analysis show that SPARC achieve both achieves strategy-proofness, and we implement the SPARC and extensively evaluate their performance. Our evaluation results show that SPARC achieve good performance in terms of social welfare, smartphone sensing time utilization, and participatory sensing task satisfaction ratio.