On Designing Collusion-Resistant Incentive Mechanisms for Mobile Crowdsensing Systems

Abstract

With the tremendous popularity of smartphones and other portable devices, crowdsensing applications have become a center of attention in recent years. Different mechanisms have been designed to incentivize mobile users to participate in crowdsensing. However, there are still many open issues needed to be investigated for these incentive mechanisms. In this paper, we systematically study the collusion resistance issue for incentive mechanisms in crowdsensing applications. For a typical type of mobile crowdsensing scenarios, we have two theoretical findings, i.e., the criteria to determine whether an incentive mechanism can inherently resist the collusions with and without profit trading respectively. These criteria have direct practical benefits in screening potential incentive mechanisms for mobile crowdsensing. Furthermore, we also propose our solution that can resist any form of collusion attacks, even including profit trading among the attackers. We conduct extensive experiments to verify our theoretical results and evaluate the performance of our proposed mechanisms.