• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.11 no.7
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• pp.3413-3430
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• 2017

With the fast increasing popularity of mobile services, ubiquitous mobile devices with enhanced sensing capabilities collect and share local information towards a common goal. The recent Mobile Crowd Sensing (MCS) paradigm enables a broad range of mobile applications and undoubtedly revolutionizes many sectors of our life. A critical challenge for the MCS paradigm is to induce mobile devices to be workers providing sensing services. In this study, we examine the problem of sensing task assignment to maximize the overall performance in MCS system while ensuring reciprocal advantages among mobile devices. Based on the overlapping coalition game model, we propose a novel workload determination scheme for each individual device. The proposed scheme can effectively decompose the complex optimization problem and obtains an effective solution using the interactive learning process. Finally, we have conducted extensive simulations, and the results demonstrate that the proposed scheme achieves a fair tradeoff solution between the MCS performance and the profit of individual devices.

• Journal of Information Processing Systems
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• v.15 no.5
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• pp.1036-1054
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• 2019

Recently, concomitant with a surge in numbers of Internet of Things (IoT) devices with various sensors, mobile crowdsensing (MCS) has provided a new business model for IoT. For example, a person can share road traffic pictures taken with their smartphone via a cloud computing system and the MCS data can provide benefits to other consumers. In this service model, to encourage people to actively engage in sensing activities and to voluntarily share their sensing data, providing appropriate incentives is very important. However, the sensing data from personal devices can be sensitive to privacy, and thus the privacy issue can suppress data sharing. Therefore, the development of an appropriate privacy protection system is essential for successful MCS. In this study, we address this problem due to the conflicting objectives of privacy preservation and incentive payment. We propose a privacy-preserving mechanism that protects identity and location privacy of sensing users through an on-demand incentive payment and group signatures methods. Subsequently, we apply the proposed mechanism to one example of MCS-an intelligent parking system-and demonstrate the feasibility and efficiency of our mechanism through emulation.

• International Journal of Internet, Broadcasting and Communication
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• v.13 no.3
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• pp.63-72
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• 2021

Mobile crowd-sensing (MCS) is a promising sensing paradigm that leverages mobile users with smart devices to perform large-scale sensing tasks in order to provide services to specific applications in various domains. However, MCS sensing tasks may not always be successfully completed or timely completed for various reasons, such as accidentally leaving the tasks incomplete by the users, asynchronous transmission, or connection errors. This results in missing sensing data at specific locations and times, which can degrade the performance of the applications and lead to serious casualties. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a missing data inference approach, called missing data approximation with probabilistic tensor factorization (MDI-PTF), to approximate the missing values as closely as possible to the actual values while taking asynchronous data transmission time and different sensing locations of the mobile users into account. The proposed method first normalizes the data to limit the range of the possible values. Next, a probabilistic model of tensor factorization is formulated, and finally, the data are approximated using the gradient descent method. The performance of the proposed algorithm is verified by conducting simulations under various situations using different datasets.

• International Journal of Internet, Broadcasting and Communication
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• v.12 no.4
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• pp.102-108
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• 2020

One of the key features of a mobile crowd-sensing (MCS) system is task allocation, which aims to recruit workers efficiently to carry out the tasks. Due to various constraints of the tasks (such as specific sensor requirement and a probabilistic guarantee of task completion) and workers heterogeneity, the task allocation become challenging. This assignment problem becomes more intractable because of the deadline of the tasks and a lot of possible task completion order or moving path of workers since a worker may perform multiple tasks and need to physically visit the tasks venues to complete the tasks. Therefore, in this paper, a hybrid search algorithm for task allocation called HST is proposed to address the problem, which employ a traveling salesman problem heuristic to find the task completion order. HST is developed based on the tabu search algorithm and exploits the premature convergence avoiding concepts from the genetic algorithm and simulated annealing. The experimental results verify that our proposed scheme outperforms the existing methods while satisfying given constraints.