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.

/pdf/how-to-crowdsource-tasks-truthfully-without-sacrificing-u5breitzql.pdf

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.

/pdf/a-survey-on-mobile-crowdsensing-systems-challenges-solutions-224oot2vez.pdf

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

PROBLEM TO BE SOLVED: To receive a call without providing personal information such as contact information of a communication terminal to a shop side when receiving a waiting message in the shop by the communication terminal. SOLUTION: The system for calling a customer includes: a plurality of shop terminals A each having a noncontact type communication device B installed therein; and a server X connected to the shop terminals A via a network 1; and transmits a calling message to a communication terminal Z by a queue managed by the server X. The server X includes: a function of creating queue lists for managing the queues on a shop basis; a function of acquiring customer information possessed by the communication terminal Z as encrypted customer information via the noncontact type communication devices B; and a function of managing the obtained customer information in the respective queue lists on a waiting shop basis, and transmitting a calling message to the communication terminal Z corresponding to the customer information in a queue list order of each shop. COPYRIGHT: (C)2011,JPO&INPIT

System, method and program for calling customer, and recording medium

Recently, LTE high-speed mobile communications have allowed service developers to create various interactive applications using push communications. In a push communication, a paging procedure is required to find the location of the target mobile terminal and to notify the arrival of the pushed data. The Mobility Management Entity (MME) speculatively sends many copies of a paging message to base stations to catch the target mobile terminal. As push-communication applications increase, the workload of MME will increase owing to multiple copies of paging messages sent and this would cause, delay of communication initiation. We propose a lightweight paging method where the MME selects paging areas based on the elapsed time of the last location update in LTE. Compared to ordinary paging (i.e., the paging area is pre-configured) we show through simulation experiments that the workload is reduced in the proposed method.

Lightweight paging based on location update intervals in LTE network

It is possible to improve data transmission rate of a mobile network. A gateway GW and a plurality of foreign agents FA are connected in a ring shape. There is provided a communication method including: a step (1) of receiving, by the GW, an IP packet destined to a mobile terminal MNa from a partner terminal CN; a step (2) of transmitting, by the GW, the received packet to a link L1 of one side; a step (3) of transmitting, by the FA1, the received packet to a link L2 of one side; a step (4) of transmitting, by the FA1, the received packet further to a link L4 to which MNa is connected if the received packet has a destination address already registered in a visitor list; a step (5) of transmitting, by the FA2, the received packet to a link L3 of one side; a step (6) of terminating the process, by the FA2, if the received packet has a destination address not registered in the visitor list; and a step (7) of discarding, by the GW, the received packet.

Mobile network and communication method thereof

PROBLEM TO BE SOLVED: To provide a user certificating method wherein the principle certification is performed by the certification server of external domain even upon connection from an external domain to suppress the traffic for certification generated between the external domain and a home domain as much as possible SOLUTION: Respective certification servers preserve a global key for own domain and another global key for a domain to permit roaming A communication terminal which receives certification transmits a ticket including ticket data coded by the global key of home domain of the communication terminal together with a user discriminating information and the home domain discriminating information to the certification server, which receives the ticket, judges the global key of home domain of the communication terminal, based on the received home domain discriminating information, and carries out the certification by decoding the ticket data employing the judged global key COPYRIGHT: (C)2007,JPO&INPIT

Method of certification of user, certification server, and system

PROBLEM TO BE SOLVED: To provide a network system in which loads on a resource allocation management server can be suppressed. SOLUTION: The network system has a resource management server for setting QoS to a router in order to perform information communication between a call origination side apparatus and a call termination side apparatus through the router, and the network system is provided with: a means for receiving a response to a QoS generation request transmitted by the call termination side apparatus to the resource management server; a means for transmitting a token including QoS setting information from the call termination side apparatus to the call origination side apparatus; and a means for setting the QoS of the router on the basis of the QoS setting information included in the token. COPYRIGHT: (C)2009,JPO&INPIT

Takeshi Kubo

Papers

System, method and program for calling customer, and recording medium

Lightweight paging based on location update intervals in LTE network

Mobile network and communication method thereof

Method of certification of user, certification server, and system

Network system, resource allocation method and resource allocation program