NeTS: Small: Collaborative Research: Foundation and Design Framework for Incentives and Efficiency of Mobile Crowd Service Systems

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Recent advances in smart mobile devices (e.g., smartphones) have enabled many powerful applications and services, fundamentally changing the way we live, work, entertain, and communicate with each other. The project investigates a broad range of emerging and fast-growing smart mobile applications, such as smartphone-based cooperative streaming and data sharing, proximity-based dynamic mobile clouds, mobile device-to-device computing, and opportunistic networking. In those applications, services are provided and consumed by mobile users, through the crowds formed by those users, and through the processing and selling/reselling by service providers and resellers. The project introduces an effective design framework for mobile crowd service (MCS) systems that support those applications. The framework provides mechanisms to incentivize all users and service providers to fairly participate in such systems, which are crucial to the continuing success, wider adoption, and further innovation of smart mobile applications. The outcome of the research will have a significant impact on many aspects of our daily lives that are already permeated by smart mobile devices and applications, and will be integrated with a strong education component including curriculum development, student training, recruiting and engaging underrepresented students.The project develops a theoretic foundation and design paradigms for developing practical algorithms and architecture that effectively manage the interplay between service providers, resellers, and mobile users in a complete MCS ecosystem. The project first designs a set of dynamic algorithms to incentivize users to truthfully and fairly participate in the proximity-based MCS systems that are formed mainly by dynamic mobile users. For systems where the interaction among all players dominates system dynamics and performance, the project develops an optimization formulation to achieve overall system efficiency and stability. Furthermore, the project investigates scenarios where players might game with the system in order to gain benefit. In a cooperative setting, the project designs a fair revenue sharing mechanism through a cooperative game model of a service provider and its resellers. For the case where all players self-interestedly but rationally game with the system, the project develops a non-cooperative game for static analysis, and a fluid model for dynamic analysis. The research takes into consideration the characteristics of mobile communications, and covers a broad range of MCS systems characterized by their dynamic user mobility patterns, heterogeneous user types and service quality, and distributed and asynchronous computation requirements. This project constitutes a significant advance in the design of mobile networked systems and applications based on smart mobile devices.