Location privacy protection in asynchronous localization networks by resource allocation approaches

High precision location information formulates the basis of many modern wireless location based services (LBS). However, location privacy becomes an important issue along with the advantages that LBS offers. In this paper, we first show that, a novel eavesdropper is able to perform position estimation of the agent by purely overhearing the measurement signals between agents and anchors, using a time difference of arrival (TDOA) way. Optimal resource allocation based approaches are presented to protect the location privacy against the eavesdropper. High accuracy approximation algorithms are presented to solve the essential non-convex power optimization problems. According to the numeric results, we can see that, the presented power allocation strategies are able to prevent the eavesdropper performing accurate position estimation of the agent. We can also see that there exists an optimal tradeoff between the system localization performance and privacy protection, which can be achieved by the presented frameworks.