Fairness and Social Welfare in Incentivizing Participatory Sensing
This addresses the challenge of sustainable data collection in participatory sensing for applications like urban monitoring, though it is incremental as it builds on existing incentive methods.
The paper tackles the problem of incentivizing users to contribute high-quality data in participatory sensing by linking incentives to service demand, designing two schemes: IDF for fairness and ITF for social welfare. The results show IDF achieves near-perfect fairness (Jain's index close to 1) and ITF achieves a unique Nash equilibrium that is Pareto and globally optimal.
Participatory sensing has emerged recently as a promising approach to large-scale data collection. However, without incentives for users to regularly contribute good quality data, this method is unlikely to be viable in the long run. In this paper, we link incentive to users' demand for consuming compelling services, as an approach complementary to conventional credit or reputation based approaches. With this demand-based principle, we design two incentive schemes, Incentive with Demand Fairness (IDF) and Iterative Tank Filling (ITF), for maximizing fairness and social welfare, respectively. Our study shows that the IDF scheme is max-min fair and can score close to 1 on the Jain's fairness index, while the ITF scheme maximizes social welfare and achieves a unique Nash equilibrium which is also Pareto and globally optimal. We adopted a game theoretic approach to derive the optimal service demands. Furthermore, to address practical considerations, we use a stochastic programming technique to handle uncertainty that is often encountered in real life situations.