A comparative study of privacy protection methods for smart home environments

Due to the importance of privacy protection for smart home environments, there have been numerous propositions, to support event source anonymity using fake data transmissions and delays. Among them, periodic and probabilistic distribution-based transmission methods achieve near perfect privacy while sacrificing real time transmission of detected event data. In this paper, we aim to study the performance of various privacy protection methods for smart home environments. Our result demonstrates that 1) periodic transmission method achieves perfect privacy while resulting in large average latency of real data transmission, 2) probabilistic distribution-based transmission method lessen the latency issues of periodic method while guaranteeing near perfect privacy, and 3) privacy level depends on the number of fake data transmission when real data is triggered immediately. Based on the evaluation result, we conclude that there is trade-off between privacy, latency, and energy efficiency.