Data collection for mobile crowdsensing in the presence of selfishness

Mobile crowdsensing is an emerging approach to data collection by exploiting the sensing abilities offered by smart phones and users’ mobility. Data collection can be implemented by exploiting the forwarding opportunities given by the contacts between nodes. However, as cell phones are still resource constrained, most people are socially selfish so that they may not always cooperate with each other in data collection. In this paper, we propose a routing protocol, called Accept aNd Tolerate (ANT), which is tailored for data collection in a social environment with selfish individuals. ANT works by accepting and tolerating social selfishness as an unavoidable human characteristic. It makes relay selection based on nodes’ contacts and their willingness to cooperate. The cooperative willingness of selfish nodes is measured rationally according to the reciprocity relationship between nodes and their resource constraints. Through assessing the worthiness of carrying and forwarding a packet, ANT proposes a buffer management scheme and makes forwarding decisions. Simulations based on real traces show that ANT achieves better performance under resource-constrained circumstances than other comparable approaches.