Multi-Leader Multi-Follower Game-based Incentive Scheme for Socially-Aware Mobile Crowdsensing

As the paradigm of crowdsensing involves the data collection from users, the issue of designing reward to incentivize the users is fundamentally important to be addressed, thereby effectively enhancing the participation. In this paper, we revisit this issue in the context of socially-aware crowdsensing which integrates crowdsensing into social networks. For example, in crowdsensing-based healthcare services, the accuracy of diet recommendation for a certain user can be promoted by exploiting the nutritional information contributed and shared by the socially-connected friends of him/her taking similar types of food. To be more general and practical, we study the incentive schemes in presence of multiple crowdsensing service providers and multiple users. Understanding the behaviors of users and service providers in socially-aware crowdsensing is of paramount importance for incentive schemes. Considering this, we propose a multi-leader and multi-follower Stackelberg game approach to model the strategic interactions among service providers and users, where the social influence of users and the strategic interconnections of service providers are jointly and formally integrated into the game modeling. Through backward induction methods, we theoretically validate the existence and uniqueness of the Stackelberg equilibrium. Simulations are conducted to evaluate game equilibrium properties, and the results are presented to assess and demonstrate the performance effectiveness of the proposed game model.