Double Auction Based Incentive Mechanism for Participatory Sensing Systems

Abstract The sensors that are available in smartphones are useful to explore a diverse range of city dynamics (e.g. noise pollution, road condition, traffic condition, etc.). The potential of the smartphone sensors coupled with their widespread availability help to emerge a new paradigm of sensing known as participatory sensing. It uses the power of smartphone equipped sensors to collect, store, and analyze data with high spatiotemporal granularity. In a participatory sensing based system, a task provider (also known as a crowdsourcer) may have a set of sensing tasks regarding different dynamics of a city. Here, adequate users’ participation is necessary to acquire a sufficient amount of data which is a key factor for the participatory sensing based systems to provide good service quality. The task providers appoint a set of task executors (smartphone users i.e. participants of crowdsensing tasks) to execute those sensing tasks. But, existing works on sensing task allocation suffer from lack of good incentive mechanisms that are attractive for the task executors. In order to address this issue, in this paper, a double auction based incentive mechanism called TATA (Truthful Double Auction for Task Allocation) is proposed for participatory sensing. TATA performs fair allocation of tasks which is leading to efficient incentive mechanism. In the case of TATA, the fair allocation of sensing tasks of the task providers to the task executers indicates that the proposed double auction mechanism is able to satisfy the truthfulness property in order to resist market manipulation (i.e., untruthful bidding and asking). Specifically, TATA achieves all the desirable properties like individual rationality, truthfulness (i.e. incentive compatibility), budget balance, etc. TATA is also computationally efficient and yields high system efficiency. Additionally, the performance of the proposed incentive mechanism is evaluated and compared with the existing mechanisms through extensive simulations based on the real-world data from Amazon Mechanical Turk. TATA yields high utility and satisfaction for the task providers and executors as compared to the existing mechanisms.