Node Location Privacy Protection Based on Differentially Private Grids in Industrial Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are widely applied in industrial application with the rapid development of Industry 4.0. Combining with centralized cloud platform, the enormous computational power is provided for data analysis, such as strategy control and policy making. However, the data analysis and mining will bring the issue of privacy leakage since sensors will collect varieties of data including sensitive location information of monitored objects. Differential privacy is a novel technique that can prevent compromising single record benefits. Geospatial data can be indexed by a tree structure; however, existing differentially private release methods pay no attention to the concrete analysis about the partition granularity of data domains. Based on the overall analysis of noise error and non-uniformity error, this paper proposes a data domain partitioning model, which is more accurate to choose the grid size. A uniform grid release method is put forward based on this model. In order to further reduce the errors, similar cells are merged, and then noise is added into the merged cells. Results show that our method significantly improves the query accuracy compared with other existing methods.