Incentive mechanism design via smart contract in blockchain-based edge-assisted crowdsensing

Edge-assisted mobile crowdsensing (EMCS) has gained significant attention as a data collection paradigm. However, existing incentive mechanisms in EMCS systems rely on centralized platforms, making them impractical for the decentralized nature of EMCS systems. To address this limitation, we propose CHASER, an incentive mechanism designed for blockchain-based EMCS (BEMCS) systems. In fact, CHASER can attract more participants by satisfying the incentive requirements of budget balance, double-side truthfulness, double-side individual rationality and also high social welfare. Furthermore, the proposed BEMCS system with CHASER in smart contracts guarantees the data confidentiality by utilizing an asymmetric encryption scheme, and the anonymity of participants by applying the zero-knowledge succinct non-interactive argument of knowledge (zk-SNARK). This also restrains the malicious behaviors of participants. Finally, most simulations show that the social welfare of CHASER is increased by approximately when compared with the state-of-the-art approaches. Moreover, CHASER achieves a competitive ratio of approximately 0.8 and high task completion rate of over 0.8 in large-scale systems. These findings highlight the robustness and desirable performance of CHASER as an incentive mechanism within the BEMCS system.