BusCast: Flexible and privacy preserving message delivery using urban buses

With the popularity of intelligent mobile devices, enormous urban information has been generated and required by the public. In response, ShanghaiGrid (SG) aims to providing abundant information services to the public. With fixed schedule and urban-wide coverage, an appealing service in SG is to provide free message delivery service to the public using buses, which allows mobile device users to send messages to locations of interest via buses. The main challenge in realizing this service is to provide efficient routing scheme with privacy preservation under highly dynamic urban traffic condition. In this paper, we present an innovative scheme BusCast to tackle this problem. In BusCast, buses can pick up and forward personal messages to their destination locations in a store-carry-forward fashion. For each message, BusCast conservatively associates a routing graph rather than a fixed routing path with the message in order to adapt the dynamic of urban traffic. Meanwhile, the privacy information about the user and the message destination is concealed from both intermediate relay buses and outside adversaries. Both rigorous privacy analysis and extensive trace-driven simulations demonstrate the efficacy of BusCast scheme.