Trustworthy and Cost-Effective Cell Selection for Sparse Mobile Crowdsensing Systems

Cell selection is a critical issue in sparse mobile crowdsensing (MCS) systems. However, the sensing cost heterogeneity among different cells (subareas) has long been ignored by existing works. Moreover, the data provided by participants are not always trustworthy, and some malicious participants may intend to launch data positioning attacks, which raises a new challenge for cell selection. In this paper, to address these issues, we propose a trustworthy and cost-effective cell selection (TCECS) framework that takes cell heterogeneity and malicious participants into consideration simultaneously. To this end, we first offer to utilize an iterative statistical spatial interpolation technique to identify trustworthy participants with the help of a small portion of dedicated sensors. Furthermore, we employ the regularized mutual coherence (RMC) in compressive sensing (CS) theory to characterize the contribution to inference accuracy of measurements submitted by different trustworthy participants. Finally, the cell selection strategy, which consumes the least sensing cost while satisfying a given sensing quality, is determined via an RMC-constrained optimization problem. Extensive experiments on a real-world taxi GPS dataset demonstrate that the proposed approach can mitigate the adverse effects of malicious participants and outperforms the baselines with less sensing cost for the same required sensing quality.