  Providing an adequate long-term participation incentive is important for a
participatory sensing system to maintain enough number of active users
(sensors), so as to collect a sufficient number of data samples and support a
desired level of service quality. In this work, we consider the sensor
selection problem in a general time-dependent and location-aware participatory
sensing system, taking the long-term user participation incentive into explicit
consideration. We study the problem systematically under different information
scenarios, regarding both future information and current information
(realization). In particular, we propose a Lyapunov-based VCG auction policy
for the on-line sensor selection, which converges asymptotically to the optimal
off-line benchmark performance, even with no future information and under
(current) information asymmetry. Extensive numerical results show that our
proposed policy outperforms the state-of-art policies in the literature, in
terms of both user participation (e.g., reducing the user dropping probability
by 25% to 90%) and social performance (e.g., increasing the social welfare by
15% to 80%).
