Differential Privacy-Based Indoor Localization Privacy Protection in Edge Computing

With the popularity of smart devices and the widespread use of the Wi-Fi-based indoor localization, edge computing is becoming the mainstream paradigm of processing massive sensing data to acquire indoor localization service. However, these data which were conveyed to train the localization model unintentionally contain some sensitive information of users/devices, and were released without any protection may cause serious privacy leakage. To solve this issue, we propose a lightweight differential privacy-preserving mechanism for the edge computing environment. We extend e-differential privacy theory to a mature machine learning localization technology to achieve privacy protection while training the localization model. Experimental results on multiple real-world datasets show that, compared with the original localization technology without privacy-preserving, our proposed scheme can achieve high accuracy of indoor localization while providing differential privacy guarantee. Through regulating the value of e, the data quality loss of our method can be controlled up to 8.9% and the time consumption can be almost negligible. Therefore, our scheme can be efficiently applied in the edge networks and provides some guidance on indoor localization privacy protection in the edge computing.