A Semiopportunistic Task Allocation Framework for Mobile Crowdsensing with Deep Learning

Abstract

The IoT era observes the increasing demand for data to support various applications and services. The Mobile Crowdsensing (MCS) system then emerged. By utilizing the hybrid intelligence of humans and sensors, it is significantly beneficial to keep collecting high‐quality sensing data for all kinds of IoT applications, such as environmental monitoring, intelligent healthcare services, and traffic management. However, the service quality of MCS systems relies on a dedicated designed task allocation framework, which needs to consider the participant resource bottleneck and system utility at the same time. Recent studies tend to use a different solution to solve the two challenges. The incentive mechanism is for resolving the participant shortage problem, and task assignment methods are studied to find the best match of participants and system utility goal of MCS. Thus, existing task allocation frameworks fail to consider the participant’s expectations deeply. We propose a semiopportunistic concept‐based solution to overcome this issue. Similar to the “shared mobility” concept, our proposed task allocation framework can offer the participants routing advice without disturbing their original travel plan. The participant can accomplish the sensing request on his route. We further consider the system constraints to determine a subgroup of participants that can obtain the utility optimization goal. Specifically, we use the Graph Attention Network (GAT) to produce the target sensing area’s virtual representation and provide the participant with a payoff‐maximized route. Such a method makes our solution adapt to most of MCS scenarios’ conditions instead of using fixed system settings. Then, a reinforcement learning‐ (RL‐) based task assignment is adopted, which can help the MCS system towards better performance improvements while support different utility functions. The simulation results on various conditions demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed solution.