EPS: An Efficient and Privacy-Preserving Service Searching Scheme for Smart Community

Smart community leverages information and communications technology to improve the quality of life in terms of education, health care, and government services. In smart community, residents manage their home appliances to cooperate on stabilizing renewable power supply, energy saving, and information communications. In this paper, we propose an efficient and privacy-preserving service searching scheme (EPS) for smart community to enable residents to receive some Internet bandwidth from cooperative nearby homes so as to obtain pervasive Internet access at the cheap cost. Specifically, the EPS enables a resident to send a service request to nearby homes, and the latter responds the request with either uploading data via Internet connection or forwarding data to other homes via WiFi. As the Internet and WiFi bandwidth for homes is limited, the homes assign residents with different priorities and prefer to serve residents with high priorities. The priority is determined by a proximity score between residents and home owners, and the identity information is not disclosed in the calculation process. Moreover, the EPS preserves the location privacy of residents by adopting the multiple pseudonym techniques. Detailed privacy analyses in terms of the identity privacy and the location privacy are provided. In addition, the communication efficiency is validated through extensive simulations.