A Novel Delay-Aware and Privacy-Preserving Data-Forwarding Scheme for Urban Sensing Network

Security, communication delay, and delivery ratio are essential design issues in urban sensing networks. To address these three issues concurrently, we propose a novel delay-aware privacy-preserving (DAPP) transmission scheme based on a combination of two-phase forwarding and secret sharing. In DAPP, the collected data are first split into pieces, and then, each piece is relayed to an application data server by randomly selected intermediate delivery nodes. The two-phase forwarding method detaches the connection between the application data server and the source node, which renders it infeasible for the application data server to estimate the source node identity. The underlying secret sharing scheme and dynamic pseudonym ensure confidentiality of the collected data and anonymity of participating users. Through DAPP, we can also verify data integrity in hostile networks. Moreover, DAPP provides a framework to achieve a design tradeoff among security, communication delay, and delivery ratio. The security analysis demonstrates that DAPP can preserve location privacy while defending against side information attack. Our theoretical analysis and numerical results show that the three design issues can be adjusted to meet various security and practical implementation goals.