D2D Opportunistic Local Content Dissemination Sans Location Sharing

In this paper, we consider the problem of local content dissemination among mobile users via decentralized device-to-device (D2D) communication, where the concerned contents have relevance only within a geographic span centered at their respective location of creation. This has several potential applications, for example, advertising and sharing contents specific to an event. To this end, we propose a scheme for locality-bounded content and information dissemination (LUCID) leveraging opportunistic D2D communications. Unlike other existing works, LUCID innovates by not requiring users to share locations of the centers of localities and, thereby, provides a natural defense against possible location privacy attacks. In this paper, we theoretically characterize the behavior of LUCID for different locality sizes. Moreover, we investigate the extent to which an individual user can attempt to infer the location of a center of a locality, and discuss why that is difficult to achieve. Finally, we also consider an alternative version of LUCID where locations are partially shared. Results of simulation-based performance evaluation indicate that, when compared to an optimal scheme, LUCID can deliver contents to about two-third of the relevant users without requiring any location sharing.