A Trust-Driven Contract Incentive Scheme for Mobile Crowd-Sensing Networks

By leveraging the power of crowd, the prevalence of mobile devices in mobile crowd-sensing (MCS) networks helps and provides a wide range of sensing services through collecting and sharing sensing data. However, due to the diverse behaviours of mobile users, unreliable or malicious users and platforms could provide untrusted data, which affects the quality of sensing service. Besides, mobile users are reluctant to participate in sensing tasks without sufficient incentives. It is desirable to design a trust and incentive scheme to improve the service efficiency of MCS. In this paper, we propose a novel trust-driven contract incentive framework in MCS, which guarantees the service quality and stimulates mobile users to join sensing tasks. We first design a trust evaluation scheme between mobile users and sensing platforms based on the historical interactions to derive the reliability value of sensing platform. Then, the trust threshold is formulated to filter out malicious sensing platforms. By considering the privacy preferences of mobile users, we establish a contract incentive scheme to maximize the utility of both mobile users and sensing platforms. The design objective is to derive a set of optimal contracts under both discrete and continuous contract models. Meanwhile, the designed contracts guarantee the individual rationality (IR) and incentive compatibility (IC) properties. Finally, simulations are conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed trust-driven contract incentive scheme, and results demonstrate that the proposed scheme can jointly improve the quality of sensing service and maximize the utilities of mobile users and sensing platforms.