Sensing processes participation game of smartphones in participatory sensing systems

Participatory sensing has gained increasing attention in recent years as it is promising for empowering large-scale monitoring and knowledge discovery, leveraging a crowd of public smartphone workers. In a participatory sensing system, the platform recruits workers to participate in multiple sensing processes. However, sensing processes have limited budgets. A smartphone is only satisfied when it receives a reward large enough to cover its cost caused, e.g., by resource consumption. Considering the rationality of smartphone workers, it is of great importance for the participatory sensing system to satisfy as many workers as possible, in order to stimulate more smartphone participation. In this paper, we propose a general sensing processes participation game framework with heterogenous workers and heterogenous sensing processes. We show that it is NP-hard to find a sensing processes participation solution which maximizes the number of satisfied workers. Inspired by the finite improvement property of the game, we design and implement an algorithm of sensing processes participation, which guarantees to reach a pure Nash equilibrium in polynomial time, and allows workers to change their strategy profiles asynchronously. Simulation results show that our algorithm is effective and efficient.