Location Privacy-Aware Coded Offloading for Distributed Edge Computing

Abstract

The ever-increasing scale and complexity of the computing tasks arising from various mobile applications has fostered wide research interests in distributed edge computing. Coded edge computing is among the recent advancements in this area, which can effectively mitigate the task processing delay caused by straggling edge nodes (ENs). In edge computing, as the mobile user usually tends to offload to closer ENs to save transmit power, the adversary may stealthily infer user location by exploiting this feature. Although there have been some pioneering works on location privacy-aware offloading, they mainly focused on the single EN scenarios and may not be directly applicable to coded edge computing that involves multiple ENs. To the best of our knowledge, the location privacy issue in coded edge computing still remains largely unexplored. With this consideration, a sequential hypothesis testing based location inference attack is identified in this work to reveal the potential vulnerability of existing coded edge computing methods. Besides, a countermeasure based on dynamic EN selection is proposed, together with a location privacy-aware coded offloading scheme based on the generic Lyapunov optimization framework. In addition to analysis, simulation results are provided to justify the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.