Privacy-Aware Message Exchanges for Geographically Routed Human Movement Networks

Abstract

Abstract. This paper introduces a privacy-aware geographic routing protocol for Human Movement Networks (HumaNets). HumaNets are fully decentralized opportunistic and delay-tolerate networks composed of smartphone devices. Such networks allow participants to exchange messages phone-to-phone and have applications where traditional infrastructure is unavailable (e.g., during a disaster) and in totalitarian states where cellular network monitoring and censorship are employed. Our protocol leverages self-determined location profiles of smartphone operators' movements as a predictor of future locations, enabling efficient geographic routing over metropolitan-wide areas. Since these profiles contain sensitive information about participants' prior movements, our routing protocol is designed to minimize the exposure of sensitive information during a message exchange. We demonstrate via simulation over both synthetic and real-world trace data that our protocol is highly scalable, leaks little information, and balances privacy and efficiency: messages are 30% more likely to be delivered than similar random walk protocols, and the median latency is only 23-28% greater than epidemic protocols while requiring an order of magnitude fewer messages.

Performance evaluation of delay-tolerant wireless friend-to-friend networks for undetectable communication

“…Another related system is HumaNets [2], a routing protocol for decentralized delay-tolerant networks that exploits recur ring mobility patterns to improve performance. HumaNets does not impose such a strict restriction on links as aDTN does, since its protection goal is limited to location privacy.…”

LoSeRO

“…A message should be delivered to those hubs that are visited most by a destination in order to increase delivery probability, hence a user visiting the target or nearby hubs becomes a good candidate for carrying the message. Aviv et al in [2] proposed to divide the networked area into an equal sized grid, and every user to maintain two mobility profiles: one for its own mobility, and the other for an aggregated mobility profile of all network users. After blindly receiving a message, a user finds its suitability of becoming a good candidate to carry the message to the destination grid by comparing the two mobility profiles; if found not suitable, the message is then dropped from the buffer without informing the sender, hence, maintaining a level of security.…”

“…The study shows that the the proposed protocol achieves better delivery ratio and reduces communication cost in terms of message path length. Although our protocol shares the Geo-Casting routing with the works presented in [5,2,14], we show how LoSeRo includes a novel and efficient routing protocol based only on the users' most frequented places, and how LoSeRo achieves a very high coverage, precision trade-off.…”

Bluetooth Command and Control channel

“…There are patterns that tend to be regular since people repeatedly visit the same places over and over again (Aviv et al, 2010). These patterns can become chaotic in the sense that an act of randomness can alter the regular pattern, causing a given person to contact different people over a specific time or visit different places (Aviv et al, 2010). The patterns that tend to be regular are divided into three periods of mobility: no mobility, low mobility and high mobility.…”

“…Human mobility patterns tend to have two useful properties: regularity and chaotic (Aviv et al, 2010). There are patterns that tend to be regular since people repeatedly visit the same places over and over again (Aviv et al, 2010).…”