An Online Incentive Mechanism for Crowdsensing With Random Task Arrivals

In this article, an online truthful mechanism is designed for mobile crowdsensing systems. Traditionally, the scenario where participants arrived at the platform in an online manner has been widely discussed in existing works. On the contrary, we focus on random task arrival case to design an online truthful mechanism by jointly considering the cost budget and the requirement of sensed data of each participant. Specifically, when the task arrives, the platform must make decisions in a sequence to select a specific number of participants to obtain a better competitive ratio (CR). To address this issue, an online strategy-proof incentive mechanism is designed to minimize the social cost of the whole system and achieve truthfulness by applying the auction framework. Moreover, in order to further improve the CR of the online algorithm, a more efficient online scheme is proposed if more information on the participants is available at the platform. Theoretical and simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed online truthful mechanisms.