A truthful double auction for two-sided heterogeneous mobile crowdsensing markets

Incentive mechanisms are critical for the success of mobile crowdsensing (MCS). Existing mechanisms mainly focus on scenarios where all sensing tasks are belong to a monopolistic campaign, while ignoring the situation where multiple campaigns coexist and compete for potential sensing capacities. In this paper, we study mechanisms in a two-sided heterogeneous MCS market with multiple requesters and users, where each requester publishes a sensing campaign consisting of various tasks whereas each user can undertake multiple tasks from one or more campaigns. The mechanism design in such a market is very challenging as the demands and supplies are extremely diverse. To fairly and effectively allocate resources and facilitate trades, we propose a novel truthful double auction mechanism named TDMC. By introducing a carefully designed virtual padding requester, a two-stage allocation approach and corresponding pricing schemes for both requesters and users are developed in TDMC. Through theoretical analysis, we prove that TDMC has the properties of truthfulness, individual rationality, budget balance, computational tractability, and asymptotic efficiency as the workload supply compared with demand becomes more and more sufficient. To make TDMC more adaptable, we further introduce two more flexible bid profiles for both requesters and users, and two adjustment methods to control the sensing quality. Extensive simulations demonstrate the effectiveness of TDMC.