Maximizing Coverage Quality with Budget Constrained in Mobile Crowd-Sensing Network for Environmental Monitoring Applications

The Mobile Crowd-sensing Network is a novel cyber–physical–social network which has received great attention recently and can be used as a powerful tool to monitor the phenomenon of the field of interest. Due to the limited budget, how to choose appropriate participants to maximize the coverage quality is one of the most important issues when the mobile crowd-sensing network applies to practical application, such as air quality monitoring. In this paper, given the number of available participants, the traverse path and the reward of each participant, we investigate the problem of how to choose suitable participants to monitor an environment of a critical region by a crowd-sensing network, while the total rewards for all selected participants is not larger than the limited budget. In our solution, we first divide a big critical region such as a city into smaller regions of different size, and select some sampling points in the smaller region; the collected data of those sampling points represents the collected data of the whole smaller region. Then, we design a greedy algorithm to select participants to cover the maximum sampling points while the total rewards of selected participants does not exceed the limited budget. Finally, we evaluate the validity and efficiency of the proposed algorithm by conducting extensive simulations. The simulation results show that the greedy algorithm outperforms an existing scheme.