QLP-DCS: A Quality-Aware, Low-Cost, and Privacy-Preserving Data Collection Service for Mobile Crowd Sensing

In the service of Mobile Crowd Sensing (MCS), High-quality Data Collection (HDC), Bilateral Location Privacy Preservation (BLPP), and sensing cost are three pivotal issues. It is widely believed that HDC necessitates the recruitment of workers with high Quality of Service (QoS), which is related to the sensing data capabilities of the recruited workers and the worker-task distances. However, submitting high-quality data demands more resources from the workers, incurring higher costs. Meanwhile, BLPP techniques, aiming to conceal the locations of the workers and tasks, may impede the evaluation of the workers' QoS. Therefore, there is still a lack of a low-cost and BLPP high QoS data collection research. Motivated by this, we propose a Quality-Aware, Low-Cost, and Privacy-Preserving Data Collection Service (QLP-DCS) for MCS. First, we propose a matrix perturbation-based approach to achieve BLPP while preserving the partial order relationship of distances. Subsequently, we employ the Upper Confidence Bound indexes-based reverse auction recruiting workers to balance exploration and exploitation with the low sensing cost. Then, we propose a multi-level truth discovery approach and establish an effective trust verification mechanism. Theoretical analysis and extensive experiments validate the superior performance of our QLP-DCS.