Incentive mechanism for collaborative smartphone sensing using overlapping coalition formation games

With the rapid growth of sensor technology, smartphone sensing has become an effective approach to help improve the quality of applications in smartphones. However, the quality and quantity of the sensed data uploaded by the users are not always satisfying due to the lack of incentives for users to participate. In this paper, we design an incentive mechanism in which the users can get satisfying rewards from the platform by efficiently allocating their resources, and meanwhile, the platform can achieve a relatively high social welfare. Specifically, to solve the resource allocation problem in the incentive mechanism, we consider a cooperative game model with overlapping coalitions, in which the smartphone users can self-organize into the overlapping coalitions for different sensing tasks. Then, we propose a distributed algorithm that converges to a stable outcome in which no user has the motivation to change its current resource allocation so as to increase its individual payoff unilaterally. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme achieves a better performance than the average distribution case and the single-task distribution case in various conditions.