  With the rapid growth of sensor technology, smartphone sensing has become an
effective approach to improve the quality of smartphone applications. However,
due to time-varying wireless channels and lack of incentives for the users to
participate, the quality and quantity of the data uploaded by the smartphone
users are not always satisfying. In this paper, we consider a smartphone
sensing system in which a platform publicizes multiple tasks, and the
smartphone users choose a set of tasks to participate in. In the traditional
non-cooperative approach with incentives, each smartphone user gets rewards
from the platform as an independent individual and the limit of the wireless
channel resources is often omitted. To tackle this problem, we introduce a
novel cooperative approach with an overlapping coalition formation game
(OCF-game) model, in which the smartphone users can cooperate with each other
to form the overlapping coalitions for different sensing tasks. We also utilize
a centralized case to describe the upper bound of the system sensing
performance. Simulation results show that the cooperative approach achieves a
better performance than the non-cooperative one in various situations.
