Online Incentive Mechanism for Crowdsourced Radio Environment Map Construction

Abstract

Constructing Radio Environment Map (REM) accurately and cost-efficiently is of great importance to realize dynamic spectrum access. Two kinds of approaches are widely investigated recently, i.e., radio propagation model based approaches and sensor monitoring based approaches. However, these existing approaches are suffering from either inaccurate spectrum availability or high deployment cost. To this end, outsourcing the spectrum sensing task to mobile users that are outfitted with spectrum sensors could greatly reduce the operator’s expenditure, and meanwhile, achieve a satisfactory accuracy. The key of crowdsourced REM construction is to attract user participation. In this paper, we propose a novel online incentive mechanism for constructing a fine-grained REM with crowdsourcing in a realistic scenario, where the mobile users arrive and leave in an online manner. The proposed mechanism is proven to satisfy the truthfulness, individual rationality, computational efficiency and consumer sovereignty. Evaluation results demonstrate that the proposed mechanism outperforms the baseline schemes substantially.