An autonomous compensation game to facilitate peer data exchange in crowdsensing

The rapid penetration of mobile devices has provided ample opportunities for mobile devices to exchange sensing data on a peer basis without any centralized backend. In this paper, we design a peer based data exchanging model, where relay nodes move to certain locations to connect data providers and consumers to facilitate data delivery. Both relays and data providers can gain rewards from consumers who are willing to pay for the data. We first prove the problem of relay node assignment is NP-hard, and provide a centralized optimal method to decide which relay nodes goes to which location with an approximation ratio. Then we define an autonomous compensation game to allow relays make individual decisions without any central authority. We derive a sufficient and necessary condition for the existence of Nash equilibrium. We analyze and compare this distributed game to the centralized social optimal solution, and show that the game incurs small bounded social costs, and efficient under various network sizes, numbers of providers, consumers, and device mobility.