TY - GEN
T1 - Preserving privacy of agents in participatory-sensing schemes for traffic estimation
AU - Farokhi, Farhad
AU - Shames, Iman
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2016 IEEE.
PY - 2016/12/27
Y1 - 2016/12/27
N2 - A measure of privacy infringement for agents (or participants) travelling across a transportation network in participatory-sensing schemes for traffic estimation is introduced. The measure is defined to be the conditional probability that an external observer assigns to the private nodes in the transportation network, e.g., location of home or office, given all the position measurements that it broadcasts over time. An algorithm for finding an optimal trade-off between the measure of privacy infringement and the expected estimation error, captured by the number of the nodes over which the participant stops broadcasting its position, is proposed. The algorithm searches over a family of policies in which an agent stops transmitting its position measurements if its distance (in terms of the number of hops) to the privacy sensitive node is smaller than a prescribed threshold. Employing such symmetric policies are advantageous in terms of the resources required for implementation and the ease of computation. The results are expanded to more general policies. Further, the effect of the heterogeneity of the population density on the optimal policy is explored. Finally, the relationship between the betweenness measure of centrality and the optimal privacy-preserving policy of the agents is numerically explored.
AB - A measure of privacy infringement for agents (or participants) travelling across a transportation network in participatory-sensing schemes for traffic estimation is introduced. The measure is defined to be the conditional probability that an external observer assigns to the private nodes in the transportation network, e.g., location of home or office, given all the position measurements that it broadcasts over time. An algorithm for finding an optimal trade-off between the measure of privacy infringement and the expected estimation error, captured by the number of the nodes over which the participant stops broadcasting its position, is proposed. The algorithm searches over a family of policies in which an agent stops transmitting its position measurements if its distance (in terms of the number of hops) to the privacy sensitive node is smaller than a prescribed threshold. Employing such symmetric policies are advantageous in terms of the resources required for implementation and the ease of computation. The results are expanded to more general policies. Further, the effect of the heterogeneity of the population density on the optimal policy is explored. Finally, the relationship between the betweenness measure of centrality and the optimal privacy-preserving policy of the agents is numerically explored.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85010739402&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1109/CDC.2016.7799307
DO - 10.1109/CDC.2016.7799307
M3 - Conference contribution
T3 - 2016 IEEE 55th Conference on Decision and Control, CDC 2016
SP - 6739
EP - 6744
BT - 2016 IEEE 55th Conference on Decision and Control, CDC 2016
PB - Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
T2 - 55th IEEE Conference on Decision and Control, CDC 2016
Y2 - 12 December 2016 through 14 December 2016
ER -