Mobile Crowd Sensing (MCS) represents an emerging paradigm for collecting sensory data, leveraging the extensive sensing capabilities of widely used mobile devices to execute sensing tasks. Among the array of challenges facing current MCS systems, the incentive mechanism for data requesters and participants consistently stands out as a paramount concern. Existing incentive mechanisms often rely on model-based approaches, assuming a certain degree of prior knowledge about the MCS system, such as expected pricing for data requesters and participants. However, these assumptions are impractical in real-world scenarios. To address this challenge, we endeavor to explore a wholly model-free incentive mechanism. Specifically, we propose a Simulated Annealing Deep Q-learning (SADQ-learning) algorithm to dynamically generate the pricing policy for the sensing platform. Furthermore, to accommodate diverse incentive needs, we devise three distinct incentive modes: one focuses on maximizing the profit of the sensing platform, another dedicates to maximizing the successful matching amount of sensing tasks, and an equilibrium mode seeks a balance between the aforementioned objectives. Finally, numerical results demonstrate the superiority of SADQ-learning through comparisons with baseline algorithms.

Mobile Crowd Sensing (MCS) represents a novel paradigm which utilizes intelligent devices carried by mobile users to collect and transmit data. Appropriate incentives are essential to recruit enough participants for sensing tasks. Existing works have designed some incentive mechanisms for MCS, which are not suitable for scenarios when the participants increase significantly as a result of the booming cost. To solve the above cost problem, a Utility-Maximization Incentive Mechanism (UMIM) is proposed in this paper by leveraging the influence propagation on the social network. Participants in the same social network can benefit from the data shared by others, which shows the utility of sensing data and can be regarded as a non-monetary incentive and make the participants stay positive under relative low payoff. Therefore, by improving the utility of sensing data, the incentive cost can be effectively reduced. To maximize the data utility, we further design a tree-based structure to improve the priority experience replay mechanism of Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) in UMIM. This improvement makes the high priority experience to be sampled more quickly and efficiently, as a result, the network can learn more effectively. Numerical results show that UMIM can further improve the data utility and have better convergence.