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 obtain coincidence in IBSSID of a storage terminal by automatically performing convergence into one value in a wireless ad hoc network. SOLUTION: A wireless ad hoc communication system is constituted of a plurality of wireless terminals. Each wireless terminal comprises a means for storing ESSID; a means for storing the IBSSID; a means for storing scale information which represents the scale of a network to which the terminal itself belongs; a means for periodically transmitting a beacon with the ESSID, the IBSSID, and the scale information N registered therein; a means for receiving the beacon transmitted from another wireless terminal; and a control means for changing the self IBSSID and the scale information N, based on the IBSSID and scale information N registered in the beacon where the ESSID is coincident with that of the terminal itself. When the self scale information N is not larger than the received scale information N, the control means changes the self IBSSID and scale information N in response to the received IBSSID and scale information N. COPYRIGHT: (C)2006,JPO&NCIPI

Ad hoc multi-hop communication system, its wireless terminal, and ad hoc multi-hop network connection method

PROBLEM TO BE SOLVED: To provide an address management method or the like whereby a load of address management is not concentrated on one DHCP server even when many clients are connected to one address space SOLUTION: A plurality of DHP servers are connected to one address space A first DHCP server allocates first address to a client In this case, the first DHCP server transmits an allocation inhibit request including the first address to a second DHCP server On the other hand, the second DHCP server brings "allocation inhibit" to the first address included in the allocation inhibit request Further, when a lease period of the first address elapses, the first DHCP server transmits an inhibit release request including the first address to the second DHCP server The plural DHCP servers may preferably be interconnected to a ring network through which a packet is circulatingly transferred COPYRIGHT: (C)2008,JPO&INPIT

Address management method in plurality of dhcp servers, dhcp server, and program

PROBLEM TO BE SOLVED: To provide a routing correction method and system for correcting routing wherein data communication whose anonymousness and confidentiality are not lost is attained through the use of anonymous addresses in a way that the anonymousness and the confidentiality are not lost. SOLUTION: The routing correction method includes: a step in which a terminal detecting an interrupted link transmits an RERR by using an anonymous address; a step in which one end terminal receiving the RERR generates an RRPR and transmits the RRPR by using the anonymous address; a step in which a terminal receiving the RRPR relays the RRPR; a step in which the other end terminal receiving the RRPR generates an RREP_R and transmits the RREP_R to the one end terminal by utilizing the anonymous address; a step in which a terminal receiving the RREP_R relays the RREP_R; and a step in which the terminal relaying the RRPR and the RREP stores the anonymous address as routing information. The relaying of the RRPR and the RREP_R is carried out between terminals opposed to each other across the interrupted link by using flooding whose destination is made a broadcast address and executed by utilizing the anonymous address in other cases. COPYRIGHT: (C)2007,JPO&INPIT

Routing correction method and system

PROBLEM TO BE SOLVED: To provide a packet transfer method whereby a time required for searching a position management table can be reduced in the case of transferring a packet to a mobile terminal in an external network from a home network in a mobile IP network and a time required for transferring the packet can be reduced. SOLUTION: The packet transfer method is characterized in including: a step of generating a proxy MAC address unique to a home network 4a and including an index of items related to a mobile terminal 1a resident in an external network in a position management table 21 and permitting an ARP table 31 to register the address; and a step of acquiring an external IP address of an item corresponding to the position management table 21 on the basis of the index included in the proxy MAC address as a transfer destination and transferring an arrival IP packet transferred to the proxy MAC address by the ARP table 31 to the transfer destination. COPYRIGHT: (C)2004,JPO

Packet transfer method, packet transfer system, and computer program

PROBLEM TO BE SOLVED: To enable group identifier distribution to each member's terminal through a simple terminal operation by each member, even if the group members first meet each other SOLUTION: A mobile terminal 1 of each member belonging to the same group transmits an image photographing the same subject 5 to an identification server 3 (S2) The identification server judges the mobile terminal 1 of the member belonging to the same group based on a similarity degree of images received from a plurality of mobile terminals 1 (S3) Based on a judgement result, an identifier for the group is returned to the mobile terminals of the members belonging to the same group (S5) COPYRIGHT: (C)2010,JPO&INPIT

Group identifier generation system, mobile terminal, identification server, group identifier generating method, application service system and computer program

Takeshi Kubo

Papers

Ad hoc multi-hop communication system, its wireless terminal, and ad hoc multi-hop network connection method

Address management method in plurality of dhcp servers, dhcp server, and program

Routing correction method and system

Packet transfer method, packet transfer system, and computer program

Group identifier generation system, mobile terminal, identification server, group identifier generating method, application service system and computer program