Integration of Blockchain and Mobile Crowdsensing by Trust-Preserving Mechanism

Blockchain has been regarded as one of the promising technologies to address trust concern in data-driven mobile crowdsensing (MCS), due to its auditability, immutability and decentralization. However, simply applying blockchain in MCS while ignoring possible abnormal saboteurs hidden in numerous devices may mislead the normal operation of blockchain, resulting in untrustworthy interactions. Consequently, it is highly desirable to build a trust-preserving mechanism (TPM) to bridge the gap between MCS and blockchain. To this end, we first resort to a probabilistic trust assessment inferred from the interaction outcomes in blockchain, to incentivize normal nodes to maintain trustworthiness of interactions. Assisted by the trust assessment, trust decision is further made to filter untrusted nodes from participating in blockchain process. Simulation experiments are conducted to validate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed TPM-enabled blockchain in terms of contribution rate and consensus accuracy.