RuPS: Rural participatory sensing with rewarding mechanisms for crop monitoring

Mobile crowdsensing for rural applications is an emerging trend in developing regions. Rewarding mechanisms are warranted for the adoption of this paradigm for rural applications. Towards this end, we first develop a novel event based Rural Participatory Sensing (RuPS) framework for agricultural crop monitoring which rewards farmers based on their participation levels. To the best of our knowledge, our work is first-of-a-kind in designing reward mechanisms for rural participatory sensing. In particular, we propose a novel Multi-Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) based rewarding scheme which incorporates event-centric and GIS attributes for agricultural applications. We envision that this domain-specific rewarding scheme will be suitable for the RuPS framework to motivate farmers to participate. Participants reported events related to the citrus crop for a three-month period, using the RuPS mobile application. Based on the quantity and quality of sensing data contributed we develop a ranking scheme using MCDM methods. We conclude that the TOPSIS-AHP based ranking scheme provides the best performance score resolution in comparison with other MCDM based schemes and advocate its use for ranking participants in a RuPS framework.