Staged Incentive Mechanism for Mobile Crowd Sensing

In the context of mobile crowd sensing, incentive mechanism is crucial to recruit mobile users to participate in the sensing task and ensure participants to provide high-quality sensing data. In this paper, we investigate a staged incentive mechanism for mobile crowd sensing. We firstly divide the incentive process into two stages: recruiting stage and sensing stage. In the recruiting stage, we introduce the payment incentive coefficient and design a Stackelberg based game method. The participants can be recruited via game interaction. In the sensing stage, we propose a time-space correlation algorithm in the interaction and the winners can be screened after the sensing task. Finally, Extensive experiments show that compared to the existing positive auction incentive mechanism (PAIM) and reverse auction incentive mechanism (RAIM), our staged incentive mechanism (SIM) can effectively improve participants' motivation and achieve high-quality sensing data from both space dimension and time dimension by extending the motivation from the recruitment stage to the sensing process.