A Privacy-Preserving Location Monitoring System for Wireless Sensor Networks

—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 algo...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2011
• Where: TMC
• Authors: Chi-Yin Chow, Mohamed F. Mokbel, Tian He
• Keywords: Aggregate Location, Aggregate Location Information, Location Monitoring Services, TMC 2011