Secure Real-time User Preference Collection for Broadcast Scheduling

Efficient broadcast scheduling is essential to the performance of wireless data broadcast systems. Existing algorithms for broadcast scheduling are mostly based on the knowledge of users' data access pattern. Unfortunately, the requirement of exposing individual preference profile becomes a serious threat to user privacy. In this paper, we investigate the issue of securely collecting user access patterns in real-time for broadcast scheduling. We propose a novel secure user profile collection protocol which protects the privacy of individual users yet facilitates efficient wireless data broadcast scheduling. To address the crucial issue of power conservation in mobile devices, our scheme does not rely on expensive public key cryptography. Light computation and communication at the user end makes the scheme feasible for mobile devices with limited resource. Our theoretical security analysis shows that the proposed protocol preserves user privacy against eavesdroppers and malicious broadcast servers. Moreover, our extensive performance evaluation experiments show that the proposed scheme has low computation and communication cost