Geocast into the Past: Towards a Privacy-Preserving Spatiotemporal Multicast for Cellular Networks
This addresses privacy-preserving communication for applications like crime investigation and disease control, but it appears incremental as it builds on existing multicast concepts.
The paper tackles the problem of sending messages to mobile devices that were in a specific area during a past time span, introducing Spatiotemporal Multicast (STM) and proposing a Cluster-based STM approach with privacy protection, evaluating its performance in large-scale simulations.
This article introduces the novel concept of Spatiotemporal Multicast (STM), which is the issue of sending a message to mobile devices that have been residing at a specific area during a certain time span in the past. A wide variety of applications can be envisioned for this concept, including crime investigation, disease control, and social applications. An important aspect of these applications is the need to protect the privacy of its users. In this article, we present an extensive overview of applications and objectives to be fulfilled by an STM service. Furthermore, we propose a first Cluster-based Spatiotemporal Multicast (CSTM) approach and provide a detailed discussion of its privacy features. Finally, we evaluate the performance of our scheme in a large-scale simulation setup.