Toward trustworthy crowdsourcing in the social internet of things

In order to perform some types of complex tasks, the principles of crowdsourcing have been applied in constructing a mobile crowdsourcing network with a huge amount of human involvement and powerful mobile devices. In addition, through the social Internet of Things (SIoT) paradigm, the capability of humans and devices to discover and exploit objects with their services is augmented. Thus, SIoT has become a promising network for service discovery and composition. By introducing SIoT, we can expand the traditional mobile crowdsourcing network and achieve broader crowdsourcing application. However, some threats are also raised in SIoT environments. In order to handle these challenges, we first present a trustworthy crowdsourcing model in SIoT. In this model, social cloud provides compute and storage functions, and works as a service provider to bridge end users and sensing entities; sensing entities receive tasks and rewards from a service provider and feed back data. Then the concept of social awareness is introduced to message forwarding among objects in SIoT, providing social data links. Furthermore, a reputation-based auction mechanism is incorporated into crowdsourcing to perform winner selection and payment determination by evaluating the reliability of crowdsourcing participants. Finally, some challenges in trustworthy crowdsourcing are discussed.