Task Scheduling Mechanism for Crowdsourcing in Mobile Social Networks

With the popularization of smart phones, mobile crowdsourcing emerged and gained growing attention in the recent years. Mobile users are now able to conduct complex tasks with the communication between each other. In this paper, we study the task scheduling problem in the mobile crowdsourcing systems based on the spontaneously formed mobile social networks (MSNs). We introduce two crowdsourcing task scheduling problems under this system model, with one problem aiming to minimize the total cost of some crowdsourcing tasks and the other focusing on minimizing the final completion time of the tasks belonging to the same project. We introduce a unified framework to solve the problems and propose two approximation algorithms for these two problems in the offline versions respectively and prove Their approximation ratios accordingly. Based on the two algorithms, we further design two online algorithms to deal with the workers’ dynamism and also analyze their competitive ratios. Finally, we verify the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed methods through numerical experiments on real and synthetic datasets.