Coverage-Guaranteed and Energy-Efficient Participant Selection Strategy in Mobile Crowdsensing

In mobile crowdsensing (MCS), a participant selection strategy should be carefully designed to guarantee sufficient coverage and avoid unnecessary energy consumption. In this paper, we propose a coverage-guaranteed and energy-efficient participant selection (CG-EEPS) strategy, in which the MCS server determines participants based on the data usage profile and mobility level of mobile devices. In addition, CG-EEPS adopts a piggyback approach of sensory data for energy-efficient transmissions. To attain the optimal performance in CG-EEPS, a constraint Markov decision process (CMDP) problem is formulated and its optimal policy is obtained by a linear programming. To address the curse of dimensionality in CMDP, a greedy heuristic is proposed and evaluated. Trace-driven evaluation results demonstrate that CG-EEPS can achieve sufficient coverage rate only with 20% of participants compared to random selection schemes.