Design and experimental evaluation of market mechanisms for participatory sensing environments

Participatory Sensing concerns the sharing of sensor information within user communities, forming a body of knowledge that can be beneficial to the community itself, either directly or through specialized applications. We introduce a framework for a marketplace where such applications can sell and buy sensor information. We focus on the buyers’ side and we use various ideas from the cost-sharing literature, to propose three classes of mechanisms. We evaluate them experimentally, comparing their performance according to metrics such as social efficiency, cost coverage and budget deficit, as well as metrics related to encouraging participation.