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

智能移动设备（如智能手机）的最新进展使许多强大的应用程序和服务成为可能，从根本上改变了我们生活、工作、娱乐和相互交流的方式。该项目研究了广泛的新兴和快速增长的智能移动应用，如基于智能手机的协作流和数据共享、基于邻近的动态移动云、移动设备对设备计算和机会网络。在这些应用程序中，服务由移动用户提供和消费，通过这些用户形成的人群，并通过服务提供商和经销商的处理和销售/转售。该项目为支持这些应用程序的移动人群服务（MCS）系统引入了一个有效的设计框架。该框架提供了激励所有用户和服务提供商公平参与此类系统的机制，这对智能移动应用程序的持续成功、广泛采用和进一步创新至关重要。研究结果将对我们日常生活的许多方面产生重大影响，这些方面已经被智能移动设备和应用程序所渗透，并将与强大的教育组成部分相结合，包括课程开发，学生培训，招募和吸引代表性不足的学生。该项目为开发实用算法和架构提供理论基础和设计范例，以有效管理完整MCS生态系统中服务提供商、经销商和移动用户之间的相互作用。项目首先设计了一套动态算法，激励用户真实、公平地参与到以动态移动用户为主的基于邻近度的MCS系统中。对于所有参与者之间的相互作用主导系统动力学和性能的系统，该项目开发了一个优化公式，以实现整体系统的效率和稳定性。此外，该项目还调查了玩家为了获得利益而与系统博弈的场景。在合作环境下，通过服务提供商与经销商的合作博弈模型，设计公平的收益分享机制。对于所有参与者都是自利但理性地与系统博弈的情况，本项目开发了非合作博弈模型进行静态分析，流体模型进行动态分析。本研究考虑了移动通信的特点，涵盖了具有动态用户移动模式、异构用户类型和服务质量、分布式和异步计算需求等特点的广泛的MCS系统。该项目在基于智能移动设备的移动网络系统和应用设计方面取得了重大进展。

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.