Location Privacy-Preserving Auction Mechanisms For Mobile Crowd Sensing

Nowadays,the popularity and the abundant sensor equipments of smartphones bring a new paradigm of crowd sensing.Mobile crowd sensing shows it potential and promising future through a wide variety of application domains.The general mobile crowd sensing system consists of three categories,separately,(a)organizer,(b)platform and(c)smart-phone users.The organizer releases sensing task with certain kinds of sensor type,where to sense and other requirements.The platform then distributes the tasks and the users collect sensing data from designated areas and upload them to the platform.Nowadays,many mobile crowd sensing systems are location-based,which means each task is heterogeneous and is distributed at different places.A well-designed incentive mechanism is an effective method to attract smart-phone users to taking part in mobile crowd sensing tasks.However,an user-centric mechanism may release user's location even if the location information haven't been attached.Hence,users may not want to participate due to location privacy issues.The bids in a location-based mobile crowd sensing system reveal the relative distances between user and tasks as the distance is an important factor in decision phase.We make simulation and find the accuracy of such attack is high.To defend against such an attack in the user-centric mechanism,we propose a kind of location information privacy-preserving mechanism for mobile crowd sensing system.This mechanism encrypts the bids,hence the curious platform and the eavesdroppers cannot access the price of a user.This make the location information of the user can be protected.Meanwhile we allow the auction proceeding properly,for example,the platform can arrange the task to user with lowest price.We apply such mechanism in both incentive mechanism with lowest pay and incentive mechanism with budget constraint.We demonstrate such mechanism with both theory discussion and simulation experiments.WE show that this mechanism has little impact on auction performance but the failure rate of the attack is dramatically increased.