Incentives for Mobile Crowd Sensing: A Survey

Recent years have witnessed the fast proliferation of mobile devices (e.g., smartphones and wearable devices) in people’s lives. In addition, these devices possess powerful computation and communication capabilities, and are equipped with various built-in functional sensors. The large quantity and advanced functionalities of mobile devices have created a new interface between human beings and environments. Many mobile crowd sensing applications have thus been designed, which recruit normal users to contribute their resources for sensing tasks. To guarantee good performance of such applications, it’s essential to recruit sufficient participants. Thus, how to effectively and efficiently motivate normal users draws growing attention in the research community. This paper surveys diverse strategies that are proposed in the literature to provide incentives for stimulating users to participate in mobile crowd sensing applications. The incentives are divided into three categories: entertainment, service, and money. Entertainment means that sensing tasks are turned into playable games in order to attract participants. Incentives of service exchanging are inspired by the principle of mutual benefits. Monetary incentives give participants payments for their contributions. We describe literature works of each type comprehensively and summarize them in a compact form. Further challenges and promising future directions concerning incentive mechanism design are also discussed.