Accurate and Privacy-Preserving Task Allocation for Edge Computing Assisted Mobile Crowdsensing

Mobile crowdsensing (MCS) has heated up and has become a new paradigm of data collection. In the process of the task allocation of MCS, users are often required to provide their own location information with the server to conveniently dispatch some suitable tasks to them. However, it is possible for malicious servers to infer some sensitive information based on the user’s location such as the user’s home address or the user’s trajectory and so on which will cause serious privacy issues. Recently, differential privacy (DP) has become a promising privacy protection scheme. However, the existing DP schemes in location privacy protection for MCS do not pay attention to the accuracy of task allocation as equally as the effects of privacy protection, which often results in the task allocation to be inaccurate and inefficient. In order to overcome the shortcoming, we propose a novel MCS task allocation scheme integrating the mapping accuracy of task-worker with the privacy-preserving effect on the user’s location. Besides edge devices, its implementation system consists of a task allocation server and a third party, both of which are semitrusted, that is, both of them only know about the user’s rough location information but cannot obtain the user’s exact location. At first, to improve the response speed of MCS task requests and the location privacy protection of MCS users, our scheme can exploit more than one edge-computing node nearby a user to cooperatively participate in MCS task allocation by aggregating him/her and the near users into groups. Then, our scheme can further enhance the location privacy protection effect based on the Johnson–Lindenstrauss (JL) transformation, which can achieve accurate task allocation and hold the merits of DP. Finally, we verify the feasibility by some experiments based on two data sets. The performance is compared with that of
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he typical DP. The results show that our scheme not only provides strict privacy guarantees but also has higher performance.