Minimizing the Age of Information in the Presence of Location Privacy-Aware Mobile Agents

The recent advances in wireless sensor networks and sensing techniques enable various time-sensitive applications that require timely exchange of updates between a Base Station (BS) and ground terminals. In practice, the ground terminals may not be able to communicate with the BS directly due to constraints in transmit power and communication capability, and mobile agents are commonly employed to help collect and deliver the updates. In particular, the emerging mobile crowd sensing (MCS) provides an appealing cost-effective paradigm for such employment. However, in this case, the mobile agents are required to share their locations with the ground terminals and the BS, which incurs location privacy concerns and may deter them from participating in the information delivery process. With this consideration, a location privacy-aware payment mechanism, which can stimulate the mobile agents to report their locations with differential privacy levels desired by the BS, is proposed. Furthermore, considering that the BS usually has a limited budget, it is essential to properly select the set of mobile agents to perform the information collection tasks. Therefore, a cost-efficient mobile agent selection algorithm is proposed. Finally, simulation results are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.