Wireless Sensor Networks for Privacy Preserving Location Monitoring System

Abstract — Individuals whose personal location is being monitored by a third party (untrusted server), are vulnerable to privacy threats. Thus, we propose a privacy-preserving location monitoring system for wireless sensor networks. In our system, we design two in-network location anonymization algorithms, namely, cloaked area determination algorithm and quality-aware algorithm that will help the system to enable and provide high-quality location monitoring services for system users, while preserving personal location privacy. Both algorithms rely on the k-anonymity privacy concept, wherein, a person is indistinguishable among k persons. The cloaked area determination algorithm helps to minimize communication and computational cost, while the quality-aware algorithm helps to maximize the accuracy of the aggregate locations by minimizing their monitored areas. To utilize the aggregate location information to provide location monitoring services, we use a spatial histogram approach, to estimate the distribution of the monitored persons based on the gathered aggregate information. Then, the estimated distribution is used to provide location monitoring services by answering range queries. We aim to evaluate our system through simulated experiments.