CrowdHB: A Decentralized Location Privacy-Preserving Crowdsensing System Based on a Hybrid Blockchain Network

Abstract

With the advent of the Internet of Things (IoT), crowdsensing, as a new emerging application of the IoT that employs ubiquitous mobile users with smartphones for data collection and processing, has further deepened our knowledge. However, the problems of the current crowdsensing systems regarding system security, user privacy, and user payment (UP) raise serious privacy and security concerns, which affect participants’ adoption of the system. The Blockchain technology allows for nondeterministic multiple parties to interact with each other anonymously in a network that is not fully trusted. In this article, we propose a new decentralized crowdsensing system, called <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">CrowdHB</i> . Unlike other blockchain-based crowdsensing systems, <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">CrowdHB</i> adopts a hybrid blockchain architecture and uses smart contracts to achieve location privacy preservation and ensure data quality while improving the system performance. Furthermore, to optimize task assignments to mobile users, we propose a location privacy-preserving optimization mechanism (LPPOM) and the approach of consistency optimization (ACO) to achieve a tradeoff between user privacy and system performance. The extensive experimental results show that the proposed <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">CrowdHB</i> outperforms the other crowdsensing systems in terms of task success rate and performance for a large number of mobile users and tasks.