IIM-ARE: An Effective Interactive Incentive Mechanism Based on Adaptive Reputation Evaluation for Mobile Crowd Sensing

Mobile crowd sensing (MCS), as an innovative data acquisition model in the Internet of Things (IoT), employs an incentive mechanism based on users’ reputation evaluation, which is a mainstream reward allocation method. However, in the existing incentive mechanisms based on reputation evaluation, unidirectional incentive strategies and nonadaptive reputation models result in unequal reward allocation. To tackle this issue, we propose an effective interactive incentive mechanism based on adaptive reputation evaluation. Specifically, we generate user status thresholds to classify, rate, and weight user behaviors, based on the average quality thresholds of tasks released or data submitted by different users in each interaction round. Meanwhile, we achieve multiparty consensus by incorporating the obtained user reputation values and combining them with the cumulative reputation values from multiple rounds to obtain adaptive reputation evaluation results. Moreover, we design an interactive incentive strategy that measures users’ incentive values based on their reputation evaluation results in each round, mutually punishing malicious behaviors from both the publisher’s and the worker’s perspectives. Extensive experiments have demonstrated that our method consistently outperforms existing advanced incentive mechanisms.