Reputation-Based Incentives for Data Dissemination in Mobile Participatory Sensing Networks

The ever-more-capable smart mobile phone gave birth to a novel sensing paradigm, participatory sensing. In the application environment of mobile participatory sensing networks, mobile equipment is usually weakly connected. Due to uncertainty of connection, mobile nodes sometimes need encounter opportunities to accomplish data communication and transmission. However, the participants’ reluctance would diminish their enthusiasm if there is no incentive mechanism. To address this nontrivial issue, we propose reputation-based incentive schemes to motivate participants to disseminate reliable data in participatory sensing system, named RIDD, while minimizing incentive cost for maintaining sufficient number of reliable participants. When an intended receiver receives the data packet from a participant, the receiver authorizes the participant by an acknowledgment message within an encryption code automatically generated by the data packet, which serves as a proof of successful data delivery. RIDD evaluates participants using reputation degree calculated according to the encryption code, encouraging reliable participants to keep being interested in the participatory service with rewards. We conduct simulations in different scenarios. The results show that RIDD remarkably increases the winning probability of participants who disseminate accurate data and reduces the cost for retaining sufficient number of reliable participants.