Dynamic Participant Recruitment of Mobile Crowd Sensing for Heterogeneous Sensing Tasks

With the rapid increasing of smart mobile devices and the advances of sensing technologies, mobile crowd sensing (MCS) becomes a new popular sensing paradigm, which enables a variety of large-scale sensing applications. One of the key challenges of large-scale mobile crowd sensing systems is how to effectively select appropriate participants from a huge user pool to perform various sensing tasks while satisfying certain constraints. This becomes more complex when the sensing tasks are dynamic (coming in real time) and heterogeneous (having different temporal and spacial requirements). In this paper, we consider such a dynamic participant recruitment problem with heterogeneous sensing tasks which aims to minimize the sensing cost while maintaining certain level of probabilistic coverage. Both offline and online algorithms are proposed to solve the challenging problem. Extensive simulations over a real-life mobile dataset confirm the efficiency of the proposed algorithms.