14th EAI International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Systems: Computing, Networking and Services

Research Article

EGAIM: Enhanced Genetic Algorithm based Incentive Mechanism for Mobile Crowdsensing

  • @INPROCEEDINGS{10.4108/eai.7-11-2017.2274360,
        author={Samad Saadatmand Feyzrasa and Salil Kanhere},
        title={EGAIM: Enhanced Genetic Algorithm based Incentive Mechanism for Mobile Crowdsensing},
        proceedings={14th EAI International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Systems: Computing, Networking and Services},
        publisher={ACM},
        proceedings_a={MOBIQUITOUS},
        year={2018},
        month={4},
        keywords={mobile crowdsensing crowdsourcing incentive mechanism genetic algorithm reverse auction dynamic pricing participant selection},
        doi={10.4108/eai.7-11-2017.2274360}
    }
    
  • Samad Saadatmand Feyzrasa
    Salil Kanhere
    Year: 2018
    EGAIM: Enhanced Genetic Algorithm based Incentive Mechanism for Mobile Crowdsensing
    MOBIQUITOUS
    ACM
    DOI: 10.4108/eai.7-11-2017.2274360
Samad Saadatmand Feyzrasa1,*, Salil Kanhere1
  • 1: UNSW
*Contact email: Samad.Saadatmand@gmail.com

Abstract

Mobile Crowdsensing (MCS) systems take advantage of the ubiquity and sensing power of smartphones in data gathering. Designing an incentive mechanism for motivating the individuals to participate in such systems is vital. Reverse auction is a popular incentive framework in which the users bid their expected returns for their contributions, and the mechanism then selects a number of them as the participants based on their value for the system. In this paper, we consider the goal of participant selection as maximising the total contribution within a budget constraint where the user contributions may be disparate and coverage overlap is possible. We propose a genetic algorithm approximation solution for this optimisation problem. We call the mechanism as Genetic Algorithm based Incentive Mechanism (GAIM). We also propose an enhanced version of this approach (EGAIM) in which an improved parent selection strategy is utilised to overcome two limitations of GAIM which arise in situations where the budget is limited. We compare EGAIM with GAIM and a greedy algorithm under two real-world scenarios, and show that using EGAIM can save up to 55% of budget for achieving at the same level of contribution.