Load Balanced Mobile User Recruitment for Mobile Crowdsensing Systems

In this letter, we study the mobile user recruitment problem for mobile crowdsensing systems. Instead of minimizing the overall sensing cost or user utility, this letter aims to optimize the load balancing of the mobile users, which is particularly important for the resource-constrained individual user. We refer to such a problem as the load balanced mobile user recruitment (LB-MUR) problem. Specifically, we first formulate the LB-MUR problem as a mixed integer linear programming (LP) and prove that it is NP-hard. Then an efficient polynomial-time suboptimal algorithm is proposed, which is based on LP relaxation. Furthermore, we derive the approximation ratio of the proposed algorithm. Finally, we evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme through simulations.