  Crowdsourced wireless community network enables individual users to share
their private Wi-Fi access points (APs) with each other, hence can achieve a
large Wi-Fi coverage with a small deployment cost via crowdsourcing. This paper
presents a novel contract-based incentive framework to incentivize such a Wi-Fi
network crowdsourcing under incomplete information (where each user has certain
private information such as mobility pattern and Wi-Fi access quality). In the
proposed framework, the network operator designs and offers a set of contract
items to users, each consisting of a Wi-Fi access price (that a user can charge
others for accessing his AP) and a subscription fee (that a user needs to pay
the operator for joining the community). Different from the existing contracts
in the literature, in our contract model each user's best choice depends not
only on his private information but also on other users' choices. This greatly
complicates the contract design, as the operator needs to analyze the
equilibrium choices of all users, rather than the best choice of each single
user. We first derive the feasible contract that guarantees the users' truthful
information disclosure based on the equilibrium analysis of user choice, and
then derive the optimal (and feasible) contract that yields the maximal profit
for the operator. Our analysis shows that a user who provides a higher Wi-Fi
access quality is more likely to choose a higher Wi-Fi access price and
subscription fee, regardless of the user mobility pattern. Simulation results
further show that when increasing the average Wi-Fi access quality of users,
the operator can gain more profit, but (counter-intuitively) offer lower Wi-Fi
access prices and subscription fees for users.
