MCS-Chain: Decentralized and trustworthy mobile crowdsourcing based on blockchain

Mobile Crowdsourcing (MCS) is an effective and novel method of data collection and processing. Current MCS generally adopts a centralized architecture by depending on an assumed trusted party. This design easily suffers from single-point failure and cannot be realized in practice since a trusted service provider does not really exist. More dangerously, the centralized party may perform dishonestly and thus harms the benefit and privacy of MCS users. To tackle these problems, we propose a novel blockchain-based MCS system, named MCS-Chain, to realize fully distributed and decentralized trust management in MCS. Aiming at improving the poor efficiency of traditional blockchain technology, we propose a novel consensus mechanism for block generation, which greatly reduces computational overhead. The proposed MCS-Chain system also solves the fork issue and centralization problem suffered by most existing blockchain-based systems. Serious security analysis and experimental evaluation further illustrate the security and efficiency of our system. (C) 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.