Toward a Quality-Aware Online Pricing Mechanism for Crowdsensed Wireless Fingerprints

Fingerprinting localization systems are outstanding for its convenient deployment, where a major challenge is the high cost for collecting a huge number of received signal strength fingerprints. Mobile crowdsensing (MCS) paradigm is cost-effective for large-scale data collection; however, a quality-aware data pricing mechanism dedicated to MCSed fingerprints accommodating practical application situations including budget constraints and online data submission is still unavailable. In this paper, we present a data pricing scheme dedicated to MCSed fingerprints by enhancing the online learning technique. We first reveal the principle of fingerprints quality assessment for accurate localization. Based on the principle, we design corresponding loss and regret function, which is able to reflect values of the fingerprints with respect to localization accuracy. We then present an online pricing scheme for MCSed data, which results in that the worker's payoff is a random variable following an optimal probability density function leading to the minimum expected regret. Furthermore, we extend our scheme to application scenarios with different budget settings, where the pricing strategies for the scenarios of regret minimization with fixed budget and budget minimization for certain fingerprints quality level are investigated. Experimental results are presented to verify our theoretical analysis.