A Survey of Incentive Mechanism in MCS: Types and Characteristics

Mobile Crowd Sensing (MCS) represents a sensing paradigm in which users utilize sensor-rich mobile devices to collect and contribute data that would otherwise be difficult to gather. This data is leveraged to enable diverse applications. Users are invited to offer data services on an MCS platform, and several requesters compete for the services they want. Designing incentive systems to provide users with benefits is essential due to the costs users incur when providing crowd sensing services. It also helps motivate mobile users to participate in crowd sensing tasks. In this work, we discuss an MCS system, its evolution, architecture, phases and where an incentive mechanism comes into play. We then discuss the types of incentive mechanisms, broadly monetary and non-monetary. We state the characteristics a successful incentive mechanism should possess and review the existing mechanisms. We conclude by emphasizing the importance of maximum resource utilization by achieving an optimal combination of monetary and non-monetary incentives and identify areas of future work.