QoI-aware multitask-oriented dynamic participant selection with budget constraints

By using increasingly popular smartphones, participatory sensing systems can collect comprehensive sensory data to retrieve context-aware information for different applications (or sensing tasks). However, new challenges arise when selecting the most appropriate participants when considering their different incentive requirements, associated sensing capabilities, and uncontrollable mobility, to best satisfy the quality-of-information (QoI) requirements of multiple concurrent tasks with different budget constraints. This paper proposes a multitask-oriented participant selection strategy called 'DPS,' which is used to tackle the aforementioned challenges, where three key design elements are proposed. First is the QoI satisfaction metric, where the required QoI metrics of the collected data are quantified in terms of data granularity and quantity. Second is the multitask-orientated QoI optimization problem for participant selection, where task budgets are treated as the constraint, and the goal is to select a minimum subset of participants to best provide the QoI satisfaction metrics for all tasks. The optimization problem is then converted to a nonlinear knapsack problem and is solved by our proposed dynamic participant selection (DPS) strategy. Third is how to compute the expected amount of collected data by all (candidate) participants, where a probability-based movement model is proposed to facilitate such computation. Real and extensive trace-based simulations show that, given the same budget, the proposed participant selection strategy can achieve far better QoI satisfactions for all tasks than selecting participants randomly or through the reversed-auction-based approaches.