  Along with the development of wireless communication technology, a mass of
mobile devices are gaining stronger sensing capability, which brings a novel
paradigm to light: participatory sensing networks (PSNs). PSNs can greatly
reduce the cost of wireless sensor networks, and hence are becoming an
efficient way to obtain abundant sensing data from surrounding environment.
Therefore, PSNs would lead to significant improvement in various fields,
including cognitive communication. However, the large-scale deployment of
participatory sensing applications is hindered by the lack of incentive
mechanism, security and privacy concerns. It is still an ongoing issue to
address all three aspects simultaneously in PSNs. In this paper, we construct
an efficient privacy-preserving incentive scheme without trusted third party
(TTP) for PSNs to motivate user-participation. This scheme allows each
participant to earn credits by contributing data privately. Using blind and
partially blind signatures, the proposed scheme is proved to be secure for
privacy and incentive. Additionally, the performance evaluation in terms of
computation and storage indicates that the proposed scheme has higher
efficiency.
