A Near-Optimal Truthful Online Auction for Efficient Crowdsourced Data Trading with Dynamic Data Owners and Dynamic Data Requests

Abstract

Data is an extremely important asset in a modern scientific and commercial society. The life force behind powerful artificial intelligence (AI) or machine learning (ML) algorithms is data, especially lots of data, which makes data trading significantly essential to unlocking the power of AI or ML. Data owners who offer crowdsourced data and data consumers who request data blocks negotiate with each other to make an agreement on data assignment and trading prices via a data trading platform; consequently, both sides gain profit from the process of data trading. A great many existing studies have investigated various kinds of data sharing or trading as well as protecting data privacy or constructing a decentralized data trading platform due to mistrust issues. However, existing studies neglect an important characteristic, i.e., dynamics of both data owners and data requests in trading crowdsourced data collected by IoT devices. To this end, we first construct an auction-based model to formulate the data trading process and then propose a near-optimal online data trading algorithm that not only resolves the problem of matching dynamic data owners and randomly generated data requests but also determines the data trading price of each data block. The proposed algorithm achieves several good properties, such as a constant competitive ratio for near-optimal social efficiency, incentive compatibility, and individual rationality of participants, via rigorous theoretical analysis and extensive simulations. We further design a decentralized data trading platform in order to construct a practical data trading process incorporating the proposed data trading algorithm.