The impact of location privacy on opportunistic networks

Abstract

Opportunistic networking involves forwarding messages between proximate users, who may or may not know one another. This assumes that users are willing to forward messages to each other. This assumption may not hold if users are concerned about using the opportunistic network service. One such concern may be due to privacy; for instance, users' locations may be leaked. A privacy-concerned user may therefore disable their mobile device's opportunistic-networking features at various times, to preserve their privacy. This paper studies the impact of location privacy concerns on the performance of an opportunistic network. Using data from a real-world location-aware user study to develop a privacy model, we conduct trace-based simulations of various opportunistic routing protocols with two real-world traces. We find that users' location privacy preferences may potentially reduce the delivery performance of an opportunistic network to zero.