RESAT: A Utility-Aware Incentive Mechanism-Based Distributed Spatial Cloaking

Distributed spatial cloaking (DSC) enables users to enjoy precise location-based service (LBS) with location privacy preserving. An incentive mechanism is necessary to encourage users to cooperate. However, due to the inappropriate design of incentive mechanisms, the existing works cause low user benefits and fail to encourage users, ruining the expected incentive effect. Moreover, introducing a third party to manage users’ information also causes the existing works to disclose users’ privacy and be unpractical. To address these issues, we propose a utility-aware incentive mechanism-based distributed spatial cloaking (RESAT). By the idea of utility theory and optimization theory, RESAT devises basic and extended incentive mechanisms. The two mechanisms for assuming that all users are honest and that malicious users provide unreasonable locations. RESAT proposes an incentive mechanism-based cloaking cooperation without a third party, incorporating the developed mechanisms based on the blind signature. Theoretical analysis indicates that RESAT achieves incentive compatibility and is secure. Extensive experiments on the real data set show that compared with the existing works, RESAT enables 1 time more users to cooperate at best while eliminating the malicious behaviors that provide unreasonable locations. The required DSC construction time delay is limited.