Data Quality Aware Task Allocation With Budget Constraint in Mobile Crowdsensing

Abstract

With the pervasiveness of mobile devices, satisfying spatial-temporal coverage requirements in interested regions while considering the quality of the sensing data and the budget constraint is a major research challenge in mobile crowdsensing (MCS). In this paper, we define a novel coverage metric, quality coverage, which considers both the fraction of subareas covered by sensor readings and the quality of sensing data in each covered subarea, for diversified location-based MCS tasks. In our system, as participants with high reliability level can contribute a lot to sensing tasks, we design an incentive model that provides higher bonus to more reliable participants. After knowing the reward for the per amount of sensing data, each worker can submit an interested task set that contains several unit tasks. The platform assigns MCS tasks to these mobile workers by solving the task allocation optimization problems, which select the optimal mobile worker set under the budget of data requesters to maximize diverse and spatial coverage level in the whole sensing area. As the task allocation problems are proven to be NP-hard, we propose a heuristic and a polynomialtime greedy approximation algorithm to solve optimization problems in two different application scenarios. Simulations using both real and synthetic data sets show that our algorithms outperform existing approaches.

Keywords

• Mobile crowdsensing
• incentives
• quality coverage
• task allocation