A Privacy-Preserving Location Monitoring System for Wireless Sensor Networks

Chi-Yin Chow, Student Member, IEEE, Mohamed F. Mokbel, Member, IEEE, and Tian He, Member, IEEE

Abstract.Monitoring personal locations with a potentially untrusted server poses privacy threats to the monitored individuals. To this end, we propose a privacy-preserving location monitoring system for wireless sensor networks. In our system, we design two innetwork location anonymization algorithms, namely, resource- and quality-aware algorithms, that aim to enable the system to provide high quality location monitoring services for system users, while preserving personal location privacy. Both algorithms rely on the well established k-anonymity privacy concept, that is, a person is indistinguishable among k persons, to enable trusted sensor nodes to provide the aggregate location information of monitored persons for our system. Each aggregate location is in a form of a monitored area A along with the number of monitored persons residing in A, where A contains at least k persons. The resource-aware algorithm aims to minimize communication and computational cost, while the quality-aware algorithm aims to maximize the accuracy of the aggregate locations by minimizing their monitored areas. To utilize the aggregate location information to provide location monitoring services, we use a spatial histogram approach that estimates the distribution of the monitored persons based on the gathered aggregate location information. Then the estimated distribution is used to provide location monitoring services through answering range queries. We evaluate our system through simulated experiments. The results show that our system provides high quality location monitoring services for system users and guarantees the location privacy of the monitored persons.

A Unified Approach to Optimizing Performance in Networks serving Heterogeneous Flows

AbstractIn this work, we study the control of communication networks in the presence of both inelastic and elastic traffic flows. The characteristics of these two types of traffic differ significantly. Hence, earlier approaches that focus on homogeneous scenarios with a single traffic type are not directly applicable. We formulate a new network optimization problem that incorporates the performance requirements of inelastic and

elastic traffic flows. The solution of this problem provides us with a new queueing architecture, and distributed load balancing and congestion control algorithm with provably optimal performance. In particular, we show that our algorithm achieves the dual goal of maximizing the aggregate utility gained by the elastic flows while satisfying the demands of inelastic flows. Our base optimal algorithm is extended to provide better delay performance for both types of traffic with minimal degradation in throughput. It is also extended to the practically relevant case of dynamic arrivals and departures. Our solution allows for a controlled interaction between the performance of inelastic and elastic traffic flows. This performance can be tuned to achieve the appropriate design tradeoff. The network performance is studied both theoretically and through extensive simulations.

Delay Analysis and Optimality of Scheduling Policies for Multi-Hop Wireless Networks
AbstractIn this paper, we analyze the delay performance of a multi-hop wireless network in which the routes between source-destination pairs are fixed. We develop a new queue grouping technique to handle the complex correlations of the service process resulting from the multi-hop nature of the flows and their mutual sharing of the wireless medium. A general setbased interference model is assumed that imposes constraints on links that can be served simultaneously at any given time. These interference constraints are used to obtain a fundamental lower bound on the delay performance of any scheduling policy for the system. We present a systematic methodology to derive such lower bounds. For a special wireless system, namely the clique, we design a policy that is sample path delay optimal. For the tandem queue network, where the delay optimal policy is known, the expected delay of the optimal policy numerically coincides with the lower bound. The lower bound analysis provides useful insights into the design and analysis of optimal or nearly optimal scheduling policies. We conduct extensive numerical studies to demonstrate that one can design policies whose average delay performance is close to the lower bound computed by the techniques presented in this paper.

Secure and Practical Outsourcing of Linear Programming in Cloud Computing

AbstractCloud Computing has great potential of providing robust computational power to the society at reduced cost. It enables customers with limited computational resources to outsource their large computation workloads to the cloud, and economically enjoy the massive computational power, bandwidth, storage, and even appropriate software that can be shared in a pay-per-use manner. Despite the tremendous benefits, security is the primary obstacle that prevents the wide adoption of this promising computing model, especially for customers when their confidential data are consumed and produced during the computation. Treating the cloud as an intrinsically insecure computing platform from the viewpoint of the cloud customers, we must design mechanisms that not only protect sensitive information by enabling computations with encrypted data, but

also protect customers from malicious behaviors by enabling the validation of the computation result. Such a mechanism of general secure computation outsourcing was recently shown to be feasible in theory, but to design mechanisms that are practically efficient remains a very challenging problem. Focusing on engineering computing and optimization tasks, this paper investigates secure outsourcing of widely applicable linear programming (LP) computations. In order to achieve practical efficiency, our mechanism design explicitly decomposes the LP computation outsourcing into public LP solvers running on the cloud and private LP parameters owned by the customer. The resulting flexibility allows us to explore appropriate security/ efficiency tradeoff via higher-level abstraction of LP computations than the general circuit representation. In particular, by formulating private data owned by the customer for LP problem as a set of matrices and vectors, we are able to develop a set of efficient privacy-preserving problem transformation techniques, which allow customers to transform original LP problem into some arbitrary one while protecting sensitive input/output information. To validate the computation result, we further explore the fundamental duality theorem of LP computation and derive the necessary and sufficient conditions that correct result must satisfy. Such result verification mechanism is extremely efficient and incurs close-to-zero additional cost on both cloud server and customers. Extensive security analysis and experiment results show the immediate practicability of our mechanism design.