User-centric privacy preservation in Internet of Things Networks

Recent trends show how the Internet of Things (IoT) and its services are becoming more omnipresent and popular. The end-to-end IoT services that are extensively used include everything from neighborhood discovery to smart home security systems, wearable health monitors, and connected appliances and vehicles. IoT leverages different kinds of networks like Location-based social networks, Mobile edge systems, Digital Twin Networks, and many more to realize these services. Many of these services rely on a constant feed of user information. Depending on the network being used, how this data is processed can vary significantly. The key thing to note is that so much data is collected, and users have little to no control over how extensively their data is used and what information is being used. This causes many privacy concerns, especially for a na ̈ıve user who does not know the implications and consequences of severe privacy breaches. When designing privacy policies, we need to understand the different user data types used in these networks. This includes user profile information, information from their queries used to get services (communication privacy), and location information which is much needed in many on-the-go services. Based on the context of the application, and the service being provided, the user data at risk and the risks themselves vary. First, we dive deep into the networks and understand the different aspects of privacy for user data and the issues faced in each such aspect. We then propose different privacy policies for these networks and focus on two main aspects of designing privacy mechanisms: The quality of service the user expects and the private information from the user’s perspective. The novel contribution here is to focus on what the user thinks and needs instead of fixating on designing privacy policies that only satisfy the third-party applications’ requirement of quality of service

Sampling-based approximate skyline query in sensor equipped IoT networks

The ever increasing requirements of data sensing applications result in the usage of IoT networks. These networks are often used for efficient data transfer. Wireless sensors are incorporated in the IoT networks to reduce the deployment and maintenance costs. Designing an energy efficient data aggregation method for sensor equipped IoT to process skyline query, is one of the most critical problems. In this paper, we propose two approximation algorithms to process the skyline query in wireless sensor networks. These two algorithms are uniform sampling based approximate skyline query and Bernoulli sampling-based approximate skyline query. Solid theoretical proofs are provided to confirm that the proposed algorithms can yield the required query results. Experiments conducted on actual datasets show that the two proposed algorithms have high performance in terms of energy consumption compared to the simple distributed algorithm