Protecting Location Privacy for Task Allocation in Ad Hoc Mobile Cloud Computing

Mobile cloud computing (MCC) is an emerging cloud-computing paradigm that integrates cloud computing and mobile computing to enable many useful mobile applications. However, the large-scale deployment of MCC is hindered by the concerns on possible privacy leakage. In this paper, we investigate the privacy issues in the ad hoc MCC, and propose a framework that can protect the location privacy when allocating tasks to mobile devices. Our mechanism is based on differential privacy and geocast, and allows mobile devices to contribute their resources to the ad hoc mobile cloud without leaking their location information. We develop analytical models and task allocation strategies that balance privacy, utility, and system overhead in an ad hoc mobile cloud. We also conduct extensive experiments based on real-world data sets, and the results show that our framework can protect location privacy for mobile devices while providing effective services with low system overhead.