A Double Auction Mechanism for Mobile Crowd Sensing with Data Reuse

Mobile Crowd Sensing (MCS) is a new paradigm of sensing, which can achieve a flexible and scalable sensing coverage with a low deployment cost, by employing mobile users/devices to perform sensing tasks. In this work, we propose a novel MCS framework with data reuse, where multiple tasks with common data requirement can share (reuse) the common data with each other through an MCS platform. We study the optimal assignment of mobile users and tasks (with data reuse) systematically, under both information symmetry and asymmetry, depending on whether the user cost and the task valuation are public information. In the former case, we formulate the assignment problem as a generalized Knapsack problem and solve the problem by using classic algorithms. In the latter case, we propose a truthful and optimal double auction mechanism, built upon the above Knapsack assignment problem, to elicit the private information of both users and tasks and meanwhile achieve the same optimal assignment as under information symmetry. Simulation results show by allowing data reuse among tasks, the social welfare can be increased up to 100~380%, comparing with those without data reuse. We further show that the proposed double auction is not budget balance for the auctioneer, mainly due to the data reuse among tasks. To this end, we further introduce a reserve price into the double auction (for each data item) to achieve a desired tradeoff between the budget balance and the social efficiency.