Consensus-Based Data-Privacy Preserving Data Aggregation

Privacy-preserving data aggregation (DA) in ad hoc networks is a challenging problem, considering the distributed communication and control requirement, dynamic network topology, unreliable communication links, etc. Different from the widely used cryptographic approaches, in this paper, we address this challenging problem by exploiting the distributed consensus technique. We first propose a secure consensus-based DA algorithm that guarantees an accurate sum aggregation while preserving the privacy of sensitive data. Then, we prove that the proposed algorithm converges accurately and is <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$(\epsilon, \sigma)$</tex-math></inline-formula>-data privacy, and the mathematical relationship between <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\epsilon$</tex-math></inline-formula> and <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\sigma$</tex-math></inline-formula> is provided. Extensive simulations have shown that the proposed algorithm has high accuracy and low complexity, and they are robust against network dynamics.