A Spatio-temporal incentive scheme with consumer demand awareness for participatory sensing

Participatory sensing involves smartphone users contributing data to form a body of knowledge. This paper first develops the concept of quality of contribution and consumption in the spatio-temporal sense for participatory sensing. Recognising that a significant issue which determines the success of participatory sensing is the incentive for contributors, we propose a spatio-temporal incentive (STI) scheme with consumer demand awareness. The STI scheme considers the spatio-temporal relevance between contributors and consumers and incentivizes contributors to contribute according to consumer demand. Only spatio-temporal relevant contributors for enquiry-based consumption and a subset of contributors which provide sufficient sensing coverage for coverage-based consumption are remunerated, which lead to a targeted and economical incentive scheme. Following the STI scheme, contributors and consumers determine their participation levels to maximize their utilities, and a resulting market equilibrium can be achieved, where the optimal contribution level and the optimal consumption rate, respectively, are employed. A closed form expression for the quality of consumption at the market equilibrium is derived. The performance of the STI scheme is investigated through extensive simulations, which show that good quality of consumption and sensing coverage can be experienced by consumers.