Monetary incentives in participatory sensing using multi-attributive auctions

Participation of people is the most important factor in providing high quality of service in participatory sensing applications. In this paper we study monetary incentives in order to stimulate user’s participation, especially in applications that rely on real-time data. Providing such incentives is hard because the service provider cannot determine the price at which each user would be willing to sell his own sensing data. Introducing traditional reverse auction mechanisms would allow to reveal this value, but they do not take under consideration the fact that sensing data are not all of same quality. This paper applies Multi-attributive Auction mechanisms that besides negotiation on the price, help service providers select the sensing data of the highest quality and also give users the incentive to further improve on them. We verify the benefits of this scheme using simulation experiments and we identify further research challenges.