Recent years have witnessed the fast proliferation of mobile devices (e.g., smartphones and wearable devices) in people's lives. In addition, these devices possess powerful computation and communication capabilities and are equipped with various built-in functional sensors. The large quantity and advanced functionalities of mobile devices have created a new interface between human beings and environments. Many mobile crowd sensing applications have thus been designed which recruit normal users to contribute their resources for sensing tasks. To guarantee good performance of such applications, it's essential to recruit sufficient participants. Thus, how to effectively and efficiently motivate normal users draws growing attention in the research community. This paper surveys diverse strategies that are proposed in the literature to provide incentives for stimulating users to participate in mobile crowd sensing applications. The incentives are divided into three categories: entertainment, service, and money. Entertainment means that sensing tasks are turned into playable games to attract participants. Incentives of service exchanging are inspired by the principle of mutual benefits. Monetary incentives give participants payments for their contributions. We describe literature works of each type comprehensively and summarize them in a compact form. Further challenges and promising future directions concerning incentive mechanism design are also discussed.

Incentives for Mobile Crowd Sensing: A Survey

Smartphones are programmable and equipped with a set of cheap but powerful embedded sensors, such as accelerometer, digital compass, gyroscope, GPS, microphone, and camera. These sensors can collectively monitor a diverse range of human activities and the surrounding environment. Crowdsensing is a new paradigm which takes advantage of the pervasive smartphones to sense, collect, and analyze data beyond the scale of what was previously possible. With the crowdsensing system, a crowdsourcer can recruit smartphone users to provide sensing service. Existing crowdsensing applications and systems lack good incentive mechanisms that can attract more user participation. To address this issue, we design incentive mechanisms for crowdsensing. We consider two system models: the crowdsourcer-centric model where the crowdsourcer provides a reward shared by participating users, and the user-centric model where users have more control over the payment they will receive. For the crowdsourcer-centric model, we design an incentive mechanism using a Stackelberg game, where the crowdsourcer is the leader while the users are the followers. We show how to compute the unique Stackelberg Equilibrium, at which the utility of the crowdsourcer is maximized, and none of the users can improve its utility by unilaterally deviating from its current strategy. For the user-centric model, we design an auction-based incentive mechanism, which is computationally efficient, individually rational, profitable, and truthful. Through extensive simulations, we evaluate the performance and validate the theoretical properties of our incentive mechanisms.

Incentive mechanisms for crowdsensing: crowdsourcing with smartphones

Mobile crowdsourced 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 types to the crowdsourcer when arrive, and the crowdsourcer aims at selecting a subset of users before a specified deadline for maximizing the value of services (assumed to be a non-negative monotone submodular function) provided by selected users under a budget constraint. We design two online mechanisms, OMZ and OMG, satisfying the computational efficiency, individual rationality, budget feasibility, truthfulness, consumer sovereignty and constant competitiveness under the zero arrival-departure interval case and a more general case, respectively. Through extensive simulations, we evaluate the performance and validate the theoretical properties of our online mechanisms.

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How to crowdsource tasks truthfully without sacrificing utility: Online incentive mechanisms with budget constraint

Device-to-device communication underlaying cellular networks allows mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets to use the licensed spectrum allocated to cellular services for direct peer-to-peer transmission. D2D communication can use either one-hop transmission (i.e. D2D direct communication) or multi-hop clusterbased transmission (i.e. in D2D local area networks). The D2D devices can compete or cooperate with each other to reuse the radio resources in D2D networks. Therefore, resource allocation and access for D2D communication can be treated as games. The theories behind these games provide a variety of mathematical tools to effectively model and analyze the individual or group behaviors of D2D users. In addition, game models can provide distributed solutions to the resource allocation problems for D2D communication. The aim of this article is to demonstrate the applications of game-theoretic models to study the radio resource allocation issues in D2D communication. The article also outlines several key open research directions.

Game-theoretic resource allocation methods for device-to-device communication

Mobile crowdsensing (MCS) has gained significant attention in recent years and has become an appealing paradigm for urban sensing. For data collection, MCS systems rely on contribution from mobile devices of a large number of participants or a crowd. Smartphones, tablets, and wearable devices are deployed widely and already equipped with a rich set of sensors, making them an excellent source of information. Mobility and intelligence of humans guarantee higher coverage and better context awareness if compared to traditional sensor networks. At the same time, individuals may be reluctant to share data for privacy concerns. For this reason, MCS frameworks are specifically designed to include incentive mechanisms and address privacy concerns. Despite the growing interest in the research community, MCS solutions need a deeper investigation and categorization on many aspects that span from sensing and communication to system management and data storage. In this paper, we take the research on MCS a step further by presenting a survey on existing works in the domain and propose a detailed taxonomy to shed light on the current landscape and classify applications, methodologies, and architectures. Our objective is not only to analyze and consolidate past research but also to outline potential future research directions and synergies with other research areas.

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A Survey on Mobile Crowdsensing Systems: Challenges, Solutions, and Opportunities

PROBLEM TO BE SOLVED: To provide a method, an apparatus and a program to transmit and receive a service information based on a position information even if a position information managing server does not exist. SOLUTION: An IP address has a step to have a network prefix portion and a position information portion and to designate the position information, a step to designate a geographical range information based on the position information, and a step to decide the IP address including the position information and the geographical range information in the position information portion. The position information consists of a latitude and a longitude obtained by a GPS. Also the geographical range information is a shape information to designate the geographical range based on the position information. Especially, the IP address having a large address display like an IPv6 is required. COPYRIGHT: (C)2005,JPO&NCIPI

Ip address deciding method based on position information and its receiving packet determining method, apparatus and program

PROBLEM TO BE SOLVED: To provide a route control method, etc. which dynamically change routes consisting of two or more session management servers for each session already established on an IP (Internet Protocol) using low cost facilities. SOLUTION: The route control server which simulates a client and changes routes, transmits to a second client re-INVITE (change request) including Route (transfer route information) of a route after the change when a first client is assumed to have sent to a change source session management server. The second client updates the route set of the session following the Record-Route (record route information). Moreover, the route control server transmits to a first client re-INVITE including Route of a route after change when the second client is assumed to have sent to the change source session management server. The first client updates the route set of the session following the Record-Route. COPYRIGHT: (C)2009,JPO&INPIT

Route control method and system which dynamically change routes consisting of two or more session management servers

PROBLEM TO BE SOLVED: To provide a method and a system of authenticating a user which does not need authentication in the authentication server of a home domain as much as possible by causing the authentication server of an external domain to perform authentication in a roaming environment, and to provide an authentication server to be used in the system and a communication terminal SOLUTION: Each authentication server stores an encryption domain key of a domain capable of roaming A communication terminal to be authenticated transmits a ticket having authentication information encrypted with the domain key of the home domain of the communication terminal to the authentication server, together with user identification information and home domain identification information The authentication server having received the ticket determines the stored domain key of the home domain of the communication terminal on the basis of the home domain identification information to be received, and uses the determined domain key to decrypt the identification information of the ticket to perform authentication COPYRIGHT: (C)2006,JPO&NCIPI

Method and system of authenticating user, authentication server and communication terminal

Mathematically Designing a Local Interaction Algorithm for Decentralized Network Systems

PROBLEM TO BE SOLVED: To provide a communication device whose present address can be changed while a communication is maintained. SOLUTION: The communication device has a set of two port numbers as a connection identifier, one is a receiving end port number that is a port number used by a communication device at the other end of the connection and the other is a sending end port number that is a port number used by itself. When a connection is established, the communication device determines the connection identifier of the connection to establish by negotiating with a communication device at the other end of the connection so as not to make the connection identifier overlap with the connection identifier of the other connection that has been established already. COPYRIGHT: (C)2007,JPO&INPIT

Takeshi Kubo

Papers

Ip address deciding method based on position information and its receiving packet determining method, apparatus and program

Route control method and system which dynamically change routes consisting of two or more session management servers

Method and system of authenticating user, authentication server and communication terminal

Mathematically Designing a Local Interaction Algorithm for Decentralized Network Systems

Communication device whose address can be changed during communication, system, and communication method