A delay-aware and secure data forwarding scheme for urban sensing networks

People-centric urban sensing is envisioned as a novel urban sensing paradigm. Communication delay and security are two important design issues in urban sensing network. To address these two issues concurrently, we propose a novel DElay-Aware secuRe (DEAR) forwarding scheme by combining secret sharing and two-phase message forward. In DEAR scheme, the collected data is first split into pieces. Each piece is being relayed to the application data server through a randomly selected delivery node. The combination of secret sharing scheme and two-phase message forward ensures confidentiality of the collected data and anonymity of the participating users. It also makes it infeasible for the application data server to estimate the source node identity. Moreover, DEAR provides redundancy in message forwarding to achieve high message delivery ratio. This design makes the trade-off between security and communication delay adjustable based on selection of the (k, n) scheme.