  Mobile crowd sensing (MCS) is a new paradigm which leverages the ubiquity of
sensor-equipped mobile devices such as smartphones, music players, and
in-vehicle sensors at the edge of the Internet, to collect data. The new
paradigm will fuel the evolution of the Internet of Things to three changes as
follows: First, the terminal devices at the edge of the Internet change from
PCs to mobile phones. Second, the interactive mode extends from the virtual
space to the real physical world. Thirdly, the forwarding manner of sensing
data are undergoing the transition from the priori to the opportunistic. To
better meet the demands of MCS applications at a societal scale, incentive
mechanisms are indispensable. In this paper, we will first overview three
categories of MCS applications, and then propose a new architecture for MCS
applications. Based on the architecture, we discuss various research challenges
about incentive mechanism designs for MCS applications, followed by potential
future work discussions. Finally, we present potential future works.
