Reputation-Aware Recruitment and Credible Reporting for Platform Utility in Mobile Crowd Sensing with Smart Devices in IoT

The Internet of things (IoT) comprises a huge collection of electronic devices connected to the Internet to ensure the dependable exchange of sensing information. It involves mobile workers (MWs) who perform various activities to support enormous online services and applications. In mobile crowd sensing (MCS), a massive amount of sensing data is also generated by smart devices. Broadly, in the IoT, verifying the credibility and truthfulness of MWs’ sensing reports is needed for MWs to expect attractive rewards. MWs are recruited by paying monetary incentives that must be awarded according to the quality and quantity of the task. The main problem is that MWs may perform false reporting by sharing low-quality reported data to reduce the effort required. In the literature, false reporting is improved by hiring enough MWs for a task to evaluate the trustworthiness and acceptability of information by aggregating the submitted reports. However, it may not be possible due to budget constraints, or when malicious reporters are not identified and penalized properly. Recruitment is still not a refined process, which contributes to low sensing quality. This paper presents Reputation, Quality-aware Recruitment Platform (RQRP) to recruit MWs based on reputation for quality reporting with the intention of platform profit maximization in the IoT scenario. RQRP comprises two main phases: filtration in the selection of MWs and verifying the credibility of reported tasks. The former is focused on the selection of suitable MWs based on different criteria (e.g., reputation, bid, expected quality, and expected platform utility), while the latter is more concerned with the verification of sensing quality, evaluation of reputation score, and incentives. We developed a testbed to evaluate and analyze the datasets, and a simulation was performed for data collection scenario from smart sensing devices. Results proved the superiority of RQRP against its counterparts in terms of truthfulness, quality, and platform profit maximization. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to study the impact of truthful reporting on platform utility.