Providing Efficient Privacy-Aware Incentives for Mobile Sensing

Mobile sensing relies on data contributed by users through their mobile device (e.g., smart phone) to obtain useful information about people and their surroundings. However, users may not want to contribute due to lack of incentives and concerns on possible privacy leakage. To effectively promote user participation, both incentive and privacy issues should be addressed. Existing work on privacy-aware incentive is limited to special scenario of mobile sensing where each sensing task needs only one data report from each user, and thus not appropriate for generic scenarios in which sensing tasks may require multiple reports from each user (e.g., in environmental monitoring applications). In this paper, we propose a privacy-aware incentive scheme for general mobile sensing, which allows each sensing task to collect one or multiple reports from each user as needed. Besides being more flexible in task management, our scheme has much lower computation and communication cost compared to the existing solution. Evaluations show that, when each node only contributes data for a small fraction of sensing tasks (e.g, due to the incapability or disqualification to generate sensing data for other tasks), our scheme runs at least one order of magnitude faster.

I. Introduction

The ever-increasing popularity of mobile devices such as smart phones and tablets and the rich set of embedded sensors that usually come with them (e.g., GPS, accelerometer and microphone) have created a huge opportunity of sensing. Mobile sensing tries to harness this opportunity by collecting sensing data through mobile devices and utilizing the data to obtain rich information about people and their surroundings. It has various applications in healthcare [1], [2], traffic monitoring [3], environmental monitoring [4], etc.