| Full text | Click to download. |
| Citation | In 4th Annual International Conference on Mobile and
Ubiquitous Systems: Computing, Networking and Services, 2007.
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| Authors | James Horey
Michael M.Groat Stephanie Forrest Fernando Esponda |
Sensor networks involving human participants will require
privacy protection before wide deployment is feasible. The paper
proposes and evaluates a set of protocols that enable anonymous data
collection in a sensor network. Sensor nodes, instead of transmitting
their actual data, transmit a sample of the data complement to a
basestation. The basestation then uses the negative samples to
reconstruct a histogram of the original sensor readings. These
protocols, collectively defined as a negative survey, are
computationally simple and do not increase communication overhead.
Thus the negative survey can be implemented efficiently on
existing sensor network platforms.
We analyze the accuracy of the negative survey under a variety of
conditions and define a range of parameter values for which it is
practical. We also describe an example traffic monitoring application
that uses the negative survey to classify traffic behaviour. We
demonstrate that for reasonable traffic scenarios, the system
accurately classifies traffic behaviour without revealing
private information.