Participatory Sensing System in Presence of Multiple Buyers

Participatory sensing system (PSS) is an emerging field of research where the fundamental idea is to employ the autonomous agents (in this paper humans) carrying smart devices, as a virtual sensor for collecting and transmitting information. The most grinding work is to motivate the human agents carrying smart devices in the data collecting process. For motivating the human agents, auction theory has played a central role with a framework to incentivize the agents in the PSS. In this line, works so far have mainly considered that there are several human agents to sell the data, and one data collecting centre to buy the data. In this paper, we propose a truthful mechanism in an online double auction environment that addresses the situation where multiple sellers and multiple buyers are present in the PSS. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first truthful mechanism in double auction setting.