Multi-Round Incentive Mechanism for Cold Start-Enabled Mobile Crowdsensing

Mobile CrowdSensing (MCS) has emerged as a novel paradigm for performing large-scale sensing tasks. Many incentive mechanisms have been proposed to encourage user participation in MCS. However, most of them ignore the inevitable cold start stage of MCS, where the MCS system has just begun releasing tasks. Also, they all adopt the single-round incentive without considerations of the continuous cumulative effect. Given the severe shortage of participants in the cold start stage of MCS, this paper proposes a Multi-Round Incentive Mechanism (MRIM). MRIM is based on monetary incentives by adopting multi-round cooperation and alternating between task information diffusion and task allocation operations, both of which are NP-hard problems even without inter-round coupling imposed by system budget constraints. We explore a method to predict the probability of users participating in tasks accurately. Furthermore, we present an efficient task information diffusion algorithm to maximize the number of users participating in tasks by submitting bids. We propose a fast task allocation algorithm based on truthful auction, comprising an approximation algorithm for solving the one-round winner selection and payment calculation. With budget constraints, MRIM maximizes the number of completed tasks by iteratively performing task information diffusion and task allocation. We also prove that MRIM also possesses desired properties such as computational efficiency, user rationality, platform profitability, and price truthfulness, which can further guarantee the robustness of MRIM. The extensive simulations conducted on real-world datasets have proved the efficiency of MRIM.