Fairness-Aware Two-Stage Hybrid Sensing Method in Vehicular Crowdsensing

By utilizing on-board sensors and computing resources in intelligent vehicles, vehicular crowdsensing can collect a series of sensing data. Typically, sensing vehicles can be divided into opportunistic vehicles with fixed trajectories and participatory vehicles with changeable trajectories. Therefore, to complete sensing tasks more effectively, how to combine the advantages of the mobility characteristics of the two vehicles is a challenging problem. To solve this problem, this paper innovatively proposes a joint scheduling and incentive-driven two-stage hybrid sensing method. Specifically, the method is divided into two stages: opportunistic vehicle selection and participatory vehicle scheduling. In particular, both types of vehicles are managed through the Crowd Sensing Platform (CSP). For the first stage, this paper proposes a reverse auction-based incentive mechanism to select the lowest-cost set of vehicles to complete sensing tasks. This mechanism mainly consists of two steps: winning vehicle selection and reward payment. It is also verified that the proposed mechanism can ensure the individual rationality and truthfulness of opportunistic vehicles. For the second stage, based on the first-stage sensing results, this paper proposes a Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) based approach to scheduling participatory vehicle trajectories to complete sensing tasks. In addition, this paper also considers sensing fairness to ensure the balance of sensing task completion in different sub-regions. Through the two-stage hybrid sensing method, this paper aims to minimize the CSP overhead while ensuring sensing fairness. Finally, extensive evaluation results based on Roma taxi data sets demonstrate that the proposed method works effectively and outperforms other benchmark schemes in different working scenarios.