Quality Inference Based Task Assignment in Mobile Crowdsensing

• Published in: IEEE transactions on knowledge and data engineering 2021-10, Vol.33 (10), p.3410-3423
• Main Authors: Gao, Xiaofeng, Huang, Haowei, Liu, Chenlin, Wu, Fan, Chen, Guihai
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Algorithms; Approximation algorithms; Assignment problem; Benchmarks; Crowdsensing; Electronic devices; Inference; Inference algorithms; Mobile crowdsensing; Mobile handsets; Operations research; Redundancy; Sensors; Task analysis; task assignment; truth inference
• ISSN: 1041-4347; 1558-2191
• DOI: 10.1109/TKDE.2020.2965932

With the increase of mobile devices, Mobile Crowdsensing (MCS) has become an efficient way to ubiquitously sense and collect environment data. Comparing to traditional sensor networks, MCS has a vital advantage that workers play an active role in collecting and sensing data. However, due to the openness of MCS, workers and sensors are of different qualities. Low quality sensors and workers may yield noisy data or even inaccurate data. Which gives the importance of inferring the quality of workers and sensors and seeking a valid task assignment with enough total qualities for MCS. To solve the problem, we adopt truth inference methods to iteratively infer the truth and qualities. Based on the quality inference, this paper proposes a task assignment problem called quality-bounded task assignment with redundancy constraint (QTAR). Different from traditional task assignment problem, redundancy constraint is added to satisfy the preliminaries of truth inference, which requires that each task should be assigned a certain or more amount of workers. We prove that QTAR is NP-complete and propose a (2+\epsilon) (2+ε) - approximation algorithm for QTAR, called QTA. Finally, experiments are conducted on both synthesis data and real dataset. The results of the experiments prove the efficiency and effectiveness of our algorithms.