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With the advancement of smartphones, mobile crowdsourcing has become a new computing paradigm to efficiently support novel mobile applications. Achieving good service quality of these applications, however, necessitates the participation of large number of smartphones, which can be obtained via providing suitable incentives to smartphone users. Nonetheless, most existing incentive mechanisms assume a centralized platform for recruiting smartphones, which is prone to expose the privacy of both smartphones and task requesters. In this context, this article studies a distributed truthful incentive mechanism (DTIM) for mobile crowdsourcing, where multiple auction rounds can be conducted locally in each smartphone and task requester. Specifically, in each auction round, the participating smartphones act as the sellers and submit bids to compete for their intended crowdsourcing tasks. The task requesters, on the other hand, act as the buyers that decide on the sellers and corresponding payments, depending on their submitted bids. Finally, based on the offered payment, each smartphone selects a buyer for trading to optimize its utility. It is shown that the proposed incentive mechanism is strategy-proof, budget balanced, individually rational, and computationally efficient. Numerical results provided corroborate the beneficial properties of the scheme. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The emerging mobile crowdsensing applications are able to facilitate people's life in various aspects. A key factor to ensure that these applications can provide high-quality service is the sufficient participation of normal smartphone users. Therefore, a lot of effort has been made to design incentive mechanisms to motivate users to participate. Most of these works assume that users are associated with homogeneous costs across the whole sensing area, based on which many utility optimization models are proposed. In this paper, we consider the scenario where smartphone users have heterogeneous costs across the sensing area, i.e., users in different regions have different cost distributions. In this scenario, traditional mechanisms may generate sensing holes and recruit insufficient users in some regions with higher costs, which may lead to unsatisfactory service. To accommodate this issue, we propose two optimization models, which aim at maximizing the user cardinality and the sensing utility function for each region of the whole sensing area, respectively. We then design effective incentive mechanisms, which possess the desirable properties, including computational efficiency, individual rationality, budget feasibility, truthfulness, and good competitiveness. By conducting extensive experiments on the real-world geographical dataset, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed mechanisms in achieving the good quality of service. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rapid use of smartphones and devices leads to the development of crowdsensing (CS) systems where a large crowd of participants can take part in performing data collecting tasks in large-scale distributed networks. Participants/users in such systems are usually selfish and have private information, such as costs and identities. Budget-feasible mechanism design, as a sub-field of auction theory, is a useful paradigm for crowdsensing, which naturally formulates the procurement scenario with buyers' budgets being considered and allows the users to bid their private costs. Although the bidding behavior is well-regulated, budget-feasible mechanisms are still vulnerable to the Sybil attack where users may generate multiple fake identities to manipulate the system. Thus, it is vital to provide Sybil-proof budget-feasible mechanisms for crowdsensing. In this paper, we design a budget-feasible incentive mechanism which can guarantee truthfulness and deter Sybil attack. We prove that the proposed mechanism achieves individual rationality, truthfulness, budget feasibility, and Sybil-proofness. Extensive simulation results further validate the efficiency of the proposed mechanism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]