On the need for a reputation system in mobile phone based sensing

  • Authors:

  • Kuan Lun Huang;Salil S. Kanhere;Wen Hu

  • Affiliations:

  • School of Computer Science and Engineering, The University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia;School of Computer Science and Engineering, The University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia;Autonomous Systems Lab, CSIRO ICT Centre, Australia

  • Venue:
  • Ad Hoc Networks
  • Year:
  • 2014

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Abstract

The continual advancement in semiconductor technology has enabled vendors to integrate an increasing number of sensors, e.g., accelerometer, gyroscope, digital compass, high resolution cameras and others, in modern mobile phones. Combining with the ever expanding market penetration of mobile phones, the onboard sensors are driving the sensing community towards a new paradigm called participatory sensing in which ordinary citizens voluntarily collect and share information from their local environment using personal mobile devices. The inherent openness of this platform is a double-edged sword. While encouraging user participation on the one hand, it also makes it easy to contribute corrupted data. As such, data trustworthiness becomes a key issue which needs to be addressed to ensure sustainable development of this emerging paradigm. In this paper, we propose a reputation system in which a reputation score is calculated for each device as a reflection of the trustworthiness of its sensor data. We adopt the Gompertz function as a fundamental building block of our system, since it is better suited to deal with the unique characteristics of participatory sensing. We present an application-agnostic implementation of the system, which can work with a wide variety of participatory sensing applications. We evaluate the performance of our reputation system in the context of two real-world participatory sensing applications. Our results show that the proposed reputation system outperforms existing solutions by up to a factor of six.