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Towards Efficient and Deposit-Free Blockchain-Based Spatial Crowdsourcing

Published: 06 May 2024 Publication History

Abstract

Spatial crowdsourcing leverages the widespread use of mobile devices to outsource tasks to a crowd of users based on their geographical location. Despite its growing popularity, current crowdsourcing systems often suffer from a lack of transparency, centralization, and other security issues. Blockchain technology has revolutionized this sector with its potential for decentralization, security, and transparency. However, existing blockchain-based crowdsourcing systems often overlook efficient task assignment mechanisms and expose users to potential losses due to the obligatory deposit payments to smart contracts, which might be vulnerable or untrustworthy.
This article proposes EDF-Crowd, an Efficient and Deposit-Free blockchain-based spatial crowdsoucing framework, to address these challenges. EDF-Crowd introduces an efficient, customizable task assignment mechanism based on smart contracts, operating periodically and batch-wise. We also design a fair compensation mechanism to compensate users for the extra overhead caused by invoking certain smart contracts. More importantly, we propose a series of linkage protocols. By linking users’ back-and-forth actions, EDF-Crowd can regulate user behavior without requiring users to deposit. The versatility of EDF-Crowd also allows its application to generic crowdsourcing systems with minimal modifications. We implement EDF-Crowd based on the EOS blockchain. Extensive evaluations show that EDF-Crowd achieves high task assignment efficiency and low cost.

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  • (2024)Simple but Effective Raw-Data Level Multimodal Fusion for Composed Image RetrievalProceedings of the 47th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval10.1145/3626772.3657727(229-239)Online publication date: 10-Jul-2024
  • (2024)A Blockchain-Based Privacy Protection Model Under Quality Consideration in Spatial Crowdsourcing PlatformsIEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2024.351897312(191695-191718)Online publication date: 2024

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Published In

cover image ACM Transactions on Sensor Networks
ACM Transactions on Sensor Networks  Volume 20, Issue 3
May 2024
634 pages
EISSN:1550-4867
DOI:10.1145/3613571
  • Editor:
  • Wen Hu
Issue’s Table of Contents

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

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Publication History

Published: 06 May 2024
Online AM: 09 April 2024
Accepted: 28 March 2024
Revised: 01 December 2023
Received: 03 August 2023
Published in TOSN Volume 20, Issue 3

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Author Tags

  1. Blockchain
  2. crowdsourcing
  3. spatial crowdsourcing
  4. task assignment
  5. smart contract
  6. deposit

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  • (2024)Simple but Effective Raw-Data Level Multimodal Fusion for Composed Image RetrievalProceedings of the 47th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval10.1145/3626772.3657727(229-239)Online publication date: 10-Jul-2024
  • (2024)A Blockchain-Based Privacy Protection Model Under Quality Consideration in Spatial Crowdsourcing PlatformsIEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2024.351897312(191695-191718)Online publication date: 2024

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