To Hide Private Position Information in Localization Using Time Difference of Arrival

In most existing localization schemes, location information leakage is inevitable, since both the locations of the target and the anchors will be revealed to the entity that conducts location estimation. A malicious entity may destroy the localization infrastructure or attack the target or anchors based on the revealed locations. Therefore, location privacy preservation in localization is of great significance. This paper investigates the privacy preservation problem in localization using time difference of arrival (TDOA) under the assumptions of safe internode communication and an honest-but-curious model. Adopting the privacy-preserving summation method, we propose two privacy-preserving localization protocols for two scenarios, where the TDOA measurements are, respectively, obtained by the target and the anchors. The proposed protocols do not utilize any encryption method, and can hide the locations of both the target and the anchors by limiting the available information to other nodes. The localization performance, sufficient conditions for privacy preservation, and computation and communication complexities of the proposed protocols are theoretically analyzed. Through simulation and numerical results, we show that the proposed protocols can implement location privacy preservation without degrading the localization performance.