Are you contributing trustworthy data?: the case for a reputation system in participatory sensing

Participatory sensing is a revolutionary new paradigm in which volunteers collect and share information from their local environment using mobile phones. The inherent openness of this platform makes it easy to contribute corrupted data. This paper proposes a novel reputation system that employs the Gompertz function for computing device reputation score as a reflection of the trustworthiness of the contributed data. We implement this system in the context of a participatory noise monitoring application and conduct extensive real-world experiments using Apple iPhones. Experimental results demonstrate that our scheme achieves three-fold improvement in comparison with the state-of-the-art Beta reputation scheme.