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Reverse auction-based incentive mechanisms have been widely adopted to stimulate mobile workers to participate in mobile crowdsensing (MCS), where workers need to provide location information for winner selection. However, most existing mechanisms rely on trusted platforms. The worker’s location data uploaded to platforms thus can be easily exposed. Recent works start to incorporate location privacy in designing incentive mechanisms, but they have not considered the task’s location privacy and the worker’s location privacy simultaneously. Therefore, we propose a bilateral location privacy-preserving mechanism for MCS on untrusted platforms. In our model, each worker adopts differential privacy to obfuscate his location locally and then submits the obfuscated location together with the bid information. Besides, instead of the exact location, the task requester is only required to upload the task profile and the task’s obfuscated location. Then, we propose the lowest-cost winner selection mechanism which aims to minimize the social cost of winner selection under the location constraint while ensuring task quality requirements, and adopt the critical payment determination mechanism to determine the payments for the winners, which satisfies truthfulness, individual rationality, and computational efficiency. Theoretical analysis and extensive experiments on real-world datasets show the effectiveness of the proposed mechanisms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The minimum travel distance of task participants is one of the significant optimization objectives of privacy-preserving task assignment in mobile crowdsensing (MCS). However, when the travel distance is minimized, most of the previous schemes only focus on the task participant privacy and disregard the task requester privacy. Moreover, existing solutions usually only support the constraint of a single type, such as equality constraints or range constraints. In this paper, we propose a bilateral privacy-preserving Task Assignment mechanism for MCS (iTAM), which protects not only the task participants privacy but also the task requesters privacy and can minimize the travel distance. Furthermore, iTAM provides both equality and range constraints of task assignment by utilizing the Paillier cryptosystem. To accommodate the multiple relations between the task participants and the task, we propose the single/multiple task participants selection problems for a task requiring task participants to compete and cooperate. Experimental evaluations over synthetic and real-world data illustrate that iTAM is feasible and effective. Compared with the state-of-the-art, iTAM positively solves the optimal problem of travel distance. The complexities of iTAM are $\mathcal {O}(n)$ O (n) and $\mathcal {O}(n\log n)$ O (n log n) for a single and multiple task participants selection problems, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Task assignment is a critical issue in mobile crowdsensing (MCS), an emerging sensing paradigm applied to realize various sensing applications for smart cities. Existing task assignment schemes mostly require the exact location information of tasks and workers for optimization, which inevitably brings the issue of location privacy leakage. Therefore, researchers have started investigating privacy-preserving task assignment schemes. However, most of these works either make inaccurate assignments or only concentrate on workers’ privacy. In this article, we propose a novel bilateral privacy-preserving and accurate task assignment framework in fog-assisted MCS, called BRAKE. Specifically, we utilize the multisecret sharing scheme to preserve location privacy in the MCS task assignment, where tasks and workers only need to provide the secret shares of their real location information to fog nodes. Moreover, we consider distance-oriented and time-oriented tasks for assignment optimization and propose an adaptive top-k worker selection algorithm to accurately select the most suitable workers. The security analysis proves that BRAKE can resist collusion attacks, and the extensive evaluation results demonstrate the efficiency and accuracy of BRAKE. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In aeromagnetic surveys, poor aircraft heading and weather may frequently cause a classical optically-pumped sensor to enter into or close to its dead zone, which results in unavoidable outliers that seriously reduce aeromagnetic compensation. To address these problems, a method to identify rapidly and pre-cull magnetic outliers based on the gray system theory is proposed to reduce their negative influence during the estimation of coefficients and target detection robustness. By constructing a gray region of aeromagnetic data and then checking whether the data at the end points of the region are normal, aeromagnetic outliers can be culled. The simulation results show that even if the outlier rate is increased to 20%, the average of the correct culling rate of the proposed method can still reach 99.67%, at which the culling effect is highly robust. We constructed an experimental survey platform and conducted a flight test. The results show that the improvement ratio of the proposed method can reach 4.36, which is 10.38 times higher than the conventional method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Providing appropriate monetary rewards is an efficient way for mobile crowdsensing to motivate the participation of task participants. However, a monetary incentive mechanism is generally challenging to prevent malicious task participants and a dishonest task requester. Moreover, prior quality-aware incentive schemes are usually failed to preserve the privacy of task participants. Meanwhile, most existing privacy-preserving incentive schemes ignore the data quality of task participants. To tackle these issues, we propose a privacy-preserving and data quality-aware incentive scheme, called PACE. In particular, data quality consists of the reliability and deviation of data. Specifically, we first propose a zero-knowledge model of data reliability estimation that can protect data privacy while assessing data reliability. Then, we quantify the data quality based on the deviation between reliable data and the ground truth. Finally, we distribute monetary rewards to task participants according to their data quality. To demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of PACE, we evaluate it in a real-world dataset. The evaluation and analysis results show that PACE can prevent malicious behaviors of task participants and a task requester, and achieves both privacy-preserving and data quality measurement of task participants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mobile crowdsensing (MCS) is a popular paradigm to collect sensed data for numerous sensing applications. With the increment of tasks and workers in MCS, it has become indispensable to design efficient task allocation schemes to achieve high performance for MCS applications. Many existing works on task allocation focus on single-task allocation, which is inefficient in many MCS scenarios where workers are able to undertake multiple tasks. On the other hand, many tasks are time-limited, while the available time of workers is also limited. Therefore, time validity is essential for both tasks and workers. To accommodate these challenges, this paper proposes a multi-task allocation problem with time constraints, which investigates the impact of time constraints to multi-task allocation and aims to maximize the utility of the MCS platform. We first prove that this problem is NP-complete. Then two evolutionary algorithms are designed to solve this problem. Finally, we conduct the experiments based on synthetic and real-world datasets under different experiment settings. The results verify that the proposed algorithms achieve more competitive and stable performance compared with baseline algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In mobile crowd sensing, task allocation is of vital importance, and it has attracted much attention in recent years. Though there have been many studies focusing on task allocation, rare works took sensing duration of tasks into consideration. However, sensing duration plays a key role for the success of many sensing tasks. For example, when the crowd sensing system needs to monitor the crowd flow in locations of interest, it is better to allocate this task to workers who can record a video of certain duration rather than those who can only take a picture. In this article, we try to solve this problem by designing a duration-sensitive task allocation model, where each task is associated with a specific sensing duration. The model aims at maximizing the number of completed tasks under the constraints of sensing duration and task capacity of each worker. To find an efficient task allocation scheme for the model, we design a utility function that can reflect the probability of task completion by using the exponential distribution. Then, an efficient greedy heuristic is proposed based on the utility function. Extensive evaluations based on the simulated and real-world datasets demonstrate that the proposed algorithm outperforms the baseline methods. [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]

Mobile crowdsourcing is an emerging complex problem solving paradigm that makes use of pervasive mobile devices equipped with multi-functional sensors. Recently, vehicles have also been increasingly adopted for mobile crowdsourcing, as the vehicles, as well as drivers, can provide diverse sensing capability and predictable mobility. Existing mobile crowdsourcing algorithms mostly recruit workers to complete one kind of sensing tasks, i.e., location-based query tasks or automatic sensing tasks. In this paper, we investigate the possibility of recruiting a set of vehicles to simultaneously complete these two categories of tasks, so as to maximize the sensing utility of each participant. We first model the worker recruitment for vehicle-based crowdsourcing as a bi-objective optimization problem with respect to the sensing capability and predictable mobility of vehicles. The recruitment problem is proven to be NP-hard, and we design two heuristic algorithms based on the bi-objective greedy strategy and the multi-objective genetic algorithm to find the solutions. The experimental results with a real-world traffic trace data set show that the proposed algorithms outperform some existing algorithms in finding solutions that maximize both objectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ubiquitous smartphones with various built-in sensors have boosted development of many crowdsensing applications in recent years. To achieve good performance with this class of applications, a large number of participating users with sensed data are needed. Two important considerations for improving user participation in crowdsensing are the incentive mechanism for motivating users to contribute their sensing capabilities, and the techniques for protecting user privacy. In this article, we survey the works that address these issues by integrating privacy techniques with incentive mechanisms. We also advocate two future research directions to enhance incentive mechanisms for mobile crowdsensing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While location is one of the most important context information in mobile and pervasive computing, large-scale deployment of indoor localization system remains elusive. In this work, we propose MPiLoc, a multi-floor indoor localization system that utilizes data contributed by smartphone users through participatory sensing for automatic floor plan and radio map construction. Our system does not require manual calibration, prior knowledge, or infrastructure support. The key novelty of MPiLoc is that it clusters and merges walking trajectories annotated with sensor and signal strengths to derive a map of walking paths annotated with radio signal strengths in multi-floor indoor environments. We evaluate MPiLoc over five different indoor areas. Evaluation shows that our system can derive indoor maps for various indoor environments in multi-floor settings and achieve an average localization error of 1.82 m. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Spatial crowdsourcing and crowdsensing are two emerging crowdsourcing paradigms, which enable a variety of location-based query and sensing tasks. In spatial crowdsourcing, mobile workers are required to travel physically to target locations in order to complete query tasks. Most existing work, hence, has focused on designing efficient query task assignment schemes to maximize the task completion rate under traveling constraints of workers for spatial crowdsourcing systems. In crowdsensing, on the other hand, sensor recordings of workers’ smartphones are of interest and have been collected to build various applications. Therefore, work concerning crowdsensing has strived to maximize the coverage area of sensor trajectories by selecting a set of workers. In this paper, we investigate the integration of these two paradigms. We notice a key link between these paradigms: While a worker is traveling to the target location of a query task, his trajectory may provide valuable coverage for a sensing task. Therefore, we propose a task management framework, named SpatialRecruiter, to efficiently match workers to the merged query and sensing tasks. We propose two coverage estimation functions to compute the coverage potential of a worker. Then, we design a greedy heuristic to select and assign workers. The experimental results on a real-world dataset demonstrate that the proposed strategies are efficient and effective in meeting the requirements of both paradigms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mobile crowdsensing systems aim to provide various novel applications by employing pervasive smartphones. A key factor to enable such systems is substantial participation of normal smartphone users, which requires effective incentive mechanisms. In this paper, we investigate incentive mechanisms for online scenarios, where users arrive and interact with a task requester in a random order, and they have preferences (e.g., photographing) or limits (e.g., travel distance) over the sensing tasks. In existing online mechanisms, the task requester has limited power in assigning tasks to the selected users, i.e., it has to pay for all of the tasks specified by the selected users, although some of these tasks are of little value. To accommodate this, we investigate a more flexible setting, where the requester can actively assign most valuable tasks to the selected users. We design two online incentive mechanisms motivated by a sampling-accepting process and weighted maximum matching. We prove that the designed mechanisms achieve computational efficiency, individual rationality, budget feasibility, truthfulness, consumer sovereignty, and constant competitiveness. By carrying out extensive experiments on two real-world geographical datasets, we demonstrate the practical applicability of the proposed mechanisms. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Mobile sensing apps have proliferated rapidly over the recent years. Most of them rely on inference components heavily for detecting interesting activities or contexts. Existing work implements inference components using traditional models designed for balanced data sets, where the sizes of interesting (positive) and non-interesting (negative) data are comparable. Practically, however, the positive and negative sensing data are highly imbalanced. For example, a single daily activity such as bicycling or driving usually occupies a small portion of time, resulting in rare positive instances. Under this circumstance, the trained models based on imbalanced data tend to mislabel positive ones as negative. In this paper, we propose a new inference framework SLIM based on several machine learning techniques in order to accommodate the imbalanced nature of sensing data. Especially, guided under-sampling is employed to obtain balanced labelled subsets, followed by a similarity-based sampling that draws massive unlabelled data to enhance training. To the best of our knowledge, SLIM is the first model that considers data imbalance in mobile sensing. We prototype two sensing apps and the experimental results show that SLIM achieves higher recall (activity recognition rate) while maintaining the precision compared with five classical models. In terms of the overall recall and precision, SLIM is around $12$ percent better than the compared solutions on average. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Off-the-shelf smartphones have boosted large scale participatory sensing applications as they are equipped with various functional sensors, possess powerful computation and communication capabilities, and proliferate at a breathtaking pace. Yet the low participation level of smartphone users due to various resource consumptions, such as time and power, remains a hurdle that prevents the enjoyment brought by sensing applications. Recently, some researchers have done pioneer works in motivating users to contribute their resources by designing incentive mechanisms, which are able to provide certain rewards for participation. However, none of these works considered smartphone users’ nature of opportunistically occurring in the area of interest. Specifically, for a general smartphone sensing application, the platform would distribute tasks to each user on her arrival and has to make an immediate decision according to the user’s reply. To accommodate this general setting, we design three online incentive mechanisms, named TBA, TOIM and TOIM-AD, based on online reverse auction. TBA is designed to pursue platform utility maximization, while TOIM and TOIM-AD achieve the crucial property of truthfulness. All mechanisms possess the desired properties of computational efficiency, individual rationality, and profitability. Besides, they are highly competitive compared to the optimal offline solution. The extensive simulation results reveal the impact of the key parameters and show good approximation to the state-of-the-art offline mechanism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Crowdsourcing-based mobile applications are becoming more and more prevalent in recent years, as smartphones equipped with various built-in sensors are proliferating rapidly. The large quantity of crowdsourced sensing data stimulates researchers to accomplish some tasks that used to be costly or impossible, yet the quality of the crowdsourced data, which is of great importance, has not received sufficient attention. In reality, the low-quality crowdsourced data are prone to containing outliers that may severely impair the crowdsourcing applications. Thus in this work, we conduct pioneer investigation considering crowdsourced data quality. Specifically, we focus on estimating user motion trajectory information, which plays an essential role in multiple crowdsourcing applications, such as indoor localization, context recognition, indoor navigation, etc. We resort to the family of robust statistics and design a robust trajectory estimation scheme, name TrMCD, which is capable of alleviating the negative influence of abnormal crowdsourced user trajectories, differentiating normal users from abnormal users, and overcoming the challenge brought by spatial unbalance of crowdsourced trajectories. Two real field experiments are conducted and the results show that TrMCD is robust and effective in estimating user motion trajectories and mapping fingerprints to physical locations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]