An Efficient Prediction-Based User Recruitment for Mobile Crowdsensing

Mobile crowdsensing is a new paradigm in which a group of mobile users exploit their smart devices to cooperatively perform a large-scale sensing job. One of the users' main concerns is the cost of data uploading, which affects their willingness to participate in a crowdsensing task. In this paper, we propose an efficient Prediction-based User Recruitment for mobile crowdsEnsing (PURE), which separates the users into two groups corresponding to different price plans: Pay as you go (PAYG) and Pay monthly (PAYM). By regarding the PAYM users as destinations, the minimizing cost problem goes to recruiting the users that have the largest contact probability with a destination. We first propose a semi-Markov model to determine the probability distribution of user arrival time at points of interest (PoIs) and then get the inter-user contact probability. Next, an efficient prediction-based user-recruitment strategy for mobile crowdsensing is proposed to minimize the data uploading cost. We then propose PURE-DF by extending PURE to a case in which we address the tradeoff between the delivery ratio of sensing data and the recruiter number according to Delegation Forwarding. We conduct extensive simulations based on three widely-used real-world traces: roma/taxi, epfl, and geolife. The results show that, compared with other recruitment strategies, PURE achieves a lower recruitment payment and PURE-DF achieves the highest delivery efficiency.