Towards sustainable socially-aware mobile crowdsensing : leveraging hierarchical game for incentive mechanisms

Abstract

Traditional mobile crowdsensing has shown a great potential to address large-scale data sensing problems by allocating sensing tasks to pervasive mobile users with smart devices. As crowdsensing service provider involves data collection from mobile users, the issue of providing rewards to incentivize mobile users is fundamentally important to ensure the sustainability of crowdsensing system. Recently, socially-aware crowdsensing services have been introduced as the integration of social networks and crowdsensing platforms. For example, in health-related crowdsensing applications, a mobile user benefits from information regarding food, exercise, medicine and medical treatment collected and shared by her socially-connected friends and family members. In this thesis, incentive mechanism design is revisited in the context of socially-aware crowdsensing, where the game theory tool is used to study the interactions between crowdsensing service provider and mobile users.

In the first part of the thesis, incentive mechanism is designed by considering the underlying social network effects amid mobile social networks, for motivating the participants. Namely, one MU will obtain additional benefits from information contributed or shared by local neighbors in social networks. The process of rewarding and participating is modeled as a two-stage game, and backward induction is used to analyze the mobile users' participation level and the crowdsensing service provider's optimal reward mechanism. The analytical expressions are derived for the discriminatory incentive as well as the uniform incentive mechanisms.

In the second part of the thesis, information asymmetry challenges are investigated. A Bayesian Stackelberg game with incomplete information is formulated to analyze the interaction between the crowdsensing service provider and mobile users, where the social structure information, i.e., the social network effects, among mobile users is uncertain. The existence and uniqueness of the Bayesian Stackelberg equilibrium is analytically validated by identifying the best response strategies of the mobile users.

To be more general and practical, different with the former two parts, incentive mechanism in presence of multiple crowdsensing service providers is studied in the third part of the thesis. Understanding the behaviors of mobile users and service providers in socially-aware crowdsensing is of paramount importance for incentive mechanisms. With this focus, a multi-leader and multi-follower Stackelberg game approach is proposed to model the strategic interactions among service providers and mobile users, where the social influence of mobile users and the strategic interconnections of service providers are jointly and formally integrated into the game modeling. Through backward induction methods, the existence and uniqueness of the Stackelberg equilibrium are theoretically proved.

In summary, this thesis addresses a few urgent challenging problems with the tools of game theory in the real implementation of incentive mechanism design in the context of socially-aware crowdsensing. Extensive numerical simulations are also conducted to illustrate some important properties of the equilibrium. Finally, several promising research directions are outlined for the future work.