A Green Stackelberg-game Incentive Mechanism for Multi-service Exchange in Mobile Crowdsensing

Abstract

Although mobile crowdsensing (MCS) has become a green paradigm of collecting, analyzing, and exploiting massive amounts of sensory data, existing incentive mechanisms are not effective to stimulate users’s active participation and service contribution in multi-service exchange in MCS due to its specific features: a large number of heterogeneous users have asymmetric service requirements, workers have the freedom to choose sensing tasks as well as participation levels, and multiple sensing tasks have heterogeneous values which may be untruthful declared by the corresponding requesters. To address this issue, this article develops a green Stackelberg-game incentive mechanism to achieve selective fairness, truthfulness, and bounded efficiency while reducing the burden on the platform. First, we model the multi-service exchange problem as a Stackelberg multi-service exchange game consisting of multi-leader and multi-follower, in which each requester as a leader first chooses the reward declaration strategy and thus the payment for each sensing task, each worker as a follower then chooses the sensing plan strategy to maximize her own utility. We next introduce the concept of virtual currency to maintain the selective fairness to balance service request and service provision between users, in which a user earns/consumes virtual currency for providing/receiving services, and thus no one can always get services without providing services. Then, we present two novel algorithms to compute the unique Nash equilibrium for the sensing plan determination game and the reward declaration determination game, respectively, which together forms a unique Stackelberg equilibrium for the proposed game. Afterwards, we theoretically prove that the proposed green Stackelberg-game incentive mechanism achieves the desirable properties of selective fairness, truthfulness, bounded efficiency. Finally, extensive evaluation results are provided to support the validity and effectiveness of our mechanism compared with both baseline and theoretical optimal approaches.