EPPI: An E-cent-based privacy-preserving incentive mechanism for participatory sensing systems

The proliferation of mobile devices has facilitated the prevalence of participatory sensing applications in which participants collect and share information in their environments. The design of a participatory sensing application confronts two challenges: “privacy” and “incentive” which are two conflicting objectives and deserve deeper attention. Inspired by physical currency circulation system, this paper firstly proposes E-cent, a unit bearer currency. It is exchangeable, and participants can utilize it to participate in tasks anonymously. By employing E-cent, we further propose an E-cent-based privacy-preserving incentive mechanism, called EPPI, which exploits a pledge-based participating protocol to encourage participants to participate without revealing privacy and prohibit participants from sending false data. EPPI also takes advantage of a dynamic reward allocation scheme to maximize the value of the services under a budget constraint. To the best of our knowledge, EPPI is the first attempt to build an incentive mechanism while maintaining the desired privacy-preserving in participatory sensing systems. Extensive simulation and analysis results show that EPPI can achieve high anonymity level and remarkable incentive effects.