Achieving Efficient and Privacy-Preserving Worker Selection With Arbitrary Spatial Ranges for Vehicular Crowdsensing

The proliferation of intelligent connected vehicles (ICVs) has catalyzed the emergence of vehicular crowdsensing (VCS) applications, wherein sensing tasks are assigned to ICVs with abundant sensing resources and high mobility. To select workers whose future trajectories have sufficient spatio-temporal similarity with the target sensing area, workers unavoidably need to upload their trajectories to the VCS platform that is not fully trusted, thereby triggering location privacy concerns. Recently, numerous privacy-preserving worker selection schemes have been put forth. Nevertheless, they either fail to enable flexible arbitrary query ranges or incur substantial communication and computation costs, which severely limits their suitability for VCS applications. To tackle the above two issues simultaneously, we propose a novel efficient and privacy-preserving VCS worker selection scheme that supports flexible arbitrary spatial ranges. By utilizing the Bloom filter technique and lightweight cryptographic tools, our proposed scheme allows the VCS platform to efficiently collaborate with the fog server to compute the spatio-temporal similarity without leaking location-derived Bloom filters. Rigid security analysis shows that our scheme effectively preserves the location privacy of both workers and the query user. Extensive experiments are conducted and the results demonstrate that our scheme is significantly more efficient in both communication and computation compared with the state-of-the-art scheme.