Private and Flexible Urban Message Delivery

With the popularity of intelligent mobile devices, enormous amounts of urban information has been generated and demanded by the public. In response, ShanghaiGrid (SG) aims to provide abundant information services to the public. With a fixed schedule and urbanwide coverage, an appealing service in SG is to provide free message delivery service to the public using buses, which allows mobile device users to send messages to locations of interest via buses. The main challenge in realizing this service is to provide an efficient routing scheme with privacy preservation under a highly dynamic urban traffic condition. In this paper, we present the innovative scheme BusCast to tackle this problem. In BusCast, buses can pick up and forward personal messages to their destination locations in a store–carry–forward fashion. For each message, BusCast conservatively associates a routing graph rather than a fixed routing path with the message to adapt the dynamic of urban traffic. Meanwhile, the privacy information about the user and the message destination is concealed from both intermediate relay buses and outside adversaries. Both rigorous privacy analysis and extensive trace-driven simulations demonstrate the efficacy of the BusCast scheme.