Participation-Aware Incentive for Active Crowd Sensing

An increasing popularity of smartphones affects interaction behaviors between people. The ubiquity of smartphones with embedded sensors can enable attractive sensing applications for collecting and reporting data in participatory sensing environment. However, time and monetary cost hinder people from providing sensing data using their smartphones. Smartphone users will probably not participate in sensing tasks without incentive in the real world. Therefore, we propose SenseUtil which provides participation-aware incentive for crowd sensing environment. The main objectives of SenseUtil are increasing the number of sensings while keeping moderate payment. SenseUtil applies the concept of microeconomics, where demand and supply decide the value of sensed data. Several factors including sensing frequency, nearby sensing points and users´ preference, affect the incentive which dynamically changes over time. We implemented a simulation program to study the impact of participation-aware incentive mechanism in terms of sensing frequency, paid reward and traveled distance. The results demonstrate that people actively participate in sensing tasks with little additional cost in term of traveled distance while decreasing payments moderately.