Anonymous data collection scheme for cloud-aided mobile edge networks

With the rapid spread of smart sensors, data collection is becoming more and more important in Mobile Edge Networks (MENs). The collected data can be used in many applications based on the analysis results of these data by cloud computing. Nowadays, data collection schemes have been widely studied by researchers. However, most of the researches take the amount of collected data into consideration without thinking about the problem of privacy leakage of the collected data. In this paper, we propose an energy-efficient and anonymous data collection scheme for MENs to keep a balance between energy consumption and data privacy, in which the privacy information of senors is hidden during data communication. In addition, the residual energy of nodes is taken into consideration in this scheme in particular when it comes to the selection of the relay node. The security analysis shows that no privacy information of the source node and relay node is leaked to attackers. Moreover, the simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme is better than other schemes in aspects of lifetime and energy consumption. At the end of the simulation part, we present a qualitative analysis for the proposed scheme and some conventional protocols. It is noteworthy that the proposed scheme outperforms the existing protocols in terms of the above indicators.