Preserving Location Privacy in UASN through Collaboration and Semantic Encapsulation

Abstract

UASN has gained much attention during the past decades. Based on fruitful research and development, UASN could be a compelling component of the global IoT in the future. From the view of location privacy preservation, state-of-the-art investigations mainly concentrate on UASN infrastructures and focus on the location privacy preserving of the source location privacy of the infrastructures, such as anchor nodes, positioning nodes, and communication channel security. However, in the IoT scenario, the underwater positioning service provided by UASN becomes pervasive, and the location privacy of the end-user of this service will come into sight. On the other hand, the presentation model of underwater semantic location is still in use of traditional terrestrial coordinates and geometric points, the concept of underwater semantic location could be further adopted to improve the location privacy. In this article, both these two location privacy issues are concerned. From the view of a UASN positioning service user, we discuss location privacy-related problems and propos a UASN nodes collaboration method to prevent the adversary from learning the precise location of the user when they intercept the communication or hack the central node. Then a concept of "semantic envelope" is designed to encapsulate the location information, which could further strengthen the location privacy.