OPAT: Optimized Allocation of Time-Dependent Tasks for Mobile Crowdsensing

Mobile crowdsensing (MCS) is an emerging paradigm that leverages pervasive smart terminals equipped with various embedded sensors to collect sensory data for wide applications. As the sensing scale increases in MCS, the design of efficient task allocation becomes crucial. However, many prior task allocation schemes, which ignore the time for task-performing, are not applicable to the scenario where mobile users with limited time budgets are able to undertake multiple sensing tasks. In this article, we focus on the task allocation in time dependent crowdsensing systems and formulate the time dependent task allocation problem, in which both the sensing duration and the user's sensing capacity are considered. We prove that the task allocation problem is NP-hard and propose an efficient task allocation algorithm called optimized allocation scheme of time-dependent tasks (OPAT), which can maximize the sensing capacity of each mobile user. The extensive simulations are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed OPAT scheme.