A survey of incentive mechanisms for participatory sensing

Participatory sensing is now becoming more popular and has shown its great potential in various applications. It was originally proposed to recruit ordinary citizens to collect and share massive amounts of sensory data using their portable smart devices. By attracting participants and paying rewards as a return, incentive mechanisms play an important role to guarantee a stable scale of participants and to improve the accuracy/coverage/timeliness of the sensing results. Along this direction, a considerable amount of research activities have been conducted recently, ranging from experimental studies to theoretical solutions and practical applications, aiming at providing more comprehensive incentive procedures and/or protecting benefits of different system stakeholders. To this end, this paper surveys the literature over the period of 2004-2014 from the state of the art of theoretical frameworks, applications and system implementations, and experimental studies of the incentive strategies used in participatory sensing by providing up-to-date research in the literature. We also point out future directions of incentive strategies used in participatory sensing.