Differential Privacy-Based Location Privacy Protection for Edge Computing Networks

Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) has been widely applied in various Internet of Things (IoT) scenarios due to its advantages of low latency and low energy consumption. However, the offloading of tasks generated by terminal devices to edge servers inevitably raises privacy leakage concerns. Given the limited resources in MEC networks, this paper proposes a task scheduling strategy, named DQN-DP, to minimize location privacy leakage under the constraint of offloading costs. The strategy is based on a differential privacy location obfuscation probability density function. Theoretical analysis demonstrates that the probability density function employed in this study is valid and satisfies & varepsilon;-differential privacy in terms of security. Numerical results indicate that, compared to existing baseline approaches, the proposed DQN-DP algorithm effectively balances privacy leakage and offloading cost. Specifically, DQN-DP reduces privacy leakage by approximately 20% relative to baseline approaches.