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A Privacy-Preserving Location Monitoring System for Wireless Sensor Networks
January 2011 (vol. 10 no. 1)
pp. 94-107
ASCII Text
x 
 
Chi-Yin Chow, Mohamed F. Mokbel, Tian He, "A Privacy-Preserving Location Monitoring System for Wireless Sensor Networks," IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, vol. 10, no. 1, pp. 94-107, January, 2011.
 
 
BibTex
x
 
@article{ 10.1109/TMC.2010.145,
author = {Chi-Yin Chow and Mohamed F. Mokbel and Tian He},
title = {A Privacy-Preserving Location Monitoring System for Wireless Sensor Networks},
journal ={IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing},
volume = {10},
number = {1},
issn = {1536-1233},
year = {2011},
pages = {94-107},
doi = {http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/TMC.2010.145},
publisher = {IEEE Computer Society},
address = {Los Alamitos, CA, USA},
}
 
 
RefWorks Procite/RefMan/Endnote
x 
 
TY - JOUR
JO - IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing
TI - A Privacy-Preserving Location Monitoring System for Wireless Sensor Networks
IS - 1
SN - 1536-1233
SP94
EP107
EPD - 94-107
A1 - Chi-Yin Chow,
A1 - Mohamed F. Mokbel,
A1 - Tian He,
PY - 2011
KW - Location privacy
KW - wireless sensor networks
KW - location monitoring system
KW - aggregate query processing
KW - spatial histogram.
VL - 10
JA - IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing
ER -
 
Chi-Yin Chow, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis
Mohamed F. Mokbel, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis
Tian He, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis
Monitoring personal locations with a potentially untrusted server poses privacy threats to the monitored individuals. To this end, we propose a privacy-preserving location monitoring system for wireless sensor networks. In our system, we design two in-network location anonymization algorithms, namely, resource and quality-aware algorithms, that aim to enable the system to provide high-quality location monitoring services for system users, while preserving personal location privacy. Both algorithms rely on the well-established k-anonymity privacy concept, that is, a person is indistinguishable among k persons, to enable trusted sensor nodes to provide the aggregate location information of monitored persons for our system. Each aggregate location is in a form of a monitored area A along with the number of monitored persons residing in A, where A contains at least k persons. The resource-aware algorithm aims to minimize communication and computational cost, while the quality-aware algorithm aims to maximize the accuracy of the aggregate locations by minimizing their monitored areas. To utilize the aggregate location information to provide location monitoring services, we use a spatial histogram approach that estimates the distribution of the monitored persons based on the gathered aggregate location information. Then, the estimated distribution is used to provide location monitoring services through answering range queries. We evaluate our system through simulated experiments. The results show that our system provides high-quality location monitoring services for system users and guarantees the location privacy of the monitored persons.

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Index Terms:
Location privacy, wireless sensor networks, location monitoring system, aggregate query processing, spatial histogram.
Citation:
Chi-Yin Chow, Mohamed F. Mokbel, Tian He, "A Privacy-Preserving Location Monitoring System for Wireless Sensor Networks," IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, vol. 10, no. 1, pp. 94-107, Jan. 2011, doi:10.1109/TMC.2010.145
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