Frugal Online Incentive Mechanisms for Crowdsourcing Tasks Truthfully

Mobile Crowd Sensing (MCS) is a new paradigm which takes advantage of pervasive smartphones to efficiently collect data, enabling numerous novel applications. To achieve good service quality for a MCS application, incentive mechanisms are necessary to attract more user participation. Most of existing mechanisms apply only for the offline scenario where all users’ information are known a priori. On the contrary, we focus on a more realistic scenario where users arrive one by one online in a random order. Based on the online auction model, we investigate the problem that users submit their private profiles to the crowdsourcer when they arrive, and the crowdsourcer aims at selecting a subset of users before a specified deadline for minimizing the total payment while a specific number of tasks can be completed. We design three online mechanisms, Homo-OMZ, Hetero-OMZ and Hetero-OMG, all of which can satisfy the computational efficiency, individual rationality, cost-truthfulness, and consumer sovereignty. The Homo-OMZ mechanism is applicable to the homogeneous user model and can satisfy the social efficiency but not constant frugality. The Hetero-OMZ and Hetero-OMG mechanisms are applicable to both the homogeneous and heterogeneous user models, and can satisfy the constant frugality. Besides, the Hetero-OMG mechanism can also satisfy the time-truthfulness. Through extensive simulations, we evaluate the performance and validate the theoretical properties of our online mechanisms.