A Private and Efficient Mechanism for Data Uploading in Smart Cyber-Physical Systems

To provide fine-grained access to different dimensions of the physical world, the data uploading in smart cyber-physical systems suffers novel challenges on both energy conservation and privacy preservation. It is always critical for participants to consume as little energy as possible for data uploading. However, simply pursuing energy efficiency may lead to extreme disclosure of private information, especially when the uploaded contents from participants are more informative than ever. In this article, we propose a novel mechanism for data uploading in smart cyber-physical systems, which considers both energy conservation and privacy preservation. The mechanism preserves privacy by concealing abnormal behaviors of participants, while still achieves an energy-efficient scheme for data uploading by introducing an acceptable number of extra contents. To derive an optimal uploading scheme is proved to be NP-hard. Accordingly, we propose a heuristic algorithm and analyze its effectiveness. The evaluation results towards a real-world dataset demonstrate that the performance of the proposed algorithm is comparable with the optimal results.