PEACE: Privacy-Preserving and Cost-Efficient Task Offloading for Mobile-Edge Computing

The limited information processing capability and battery life of mobile devices is becoming a bottleneck in delivering more advanced and high-quality services to the customers. To address this problem, the recently advocated mobile-edge computing (MEC) architecture is promising, where the essential idea is to bring the computation resource to the network edge and allow users to wirelessly offload resource demanding computation tasks to the nearby MEC servers for potentially faster execution and lower battery consumption. Nonetheless, the existing understanding of the privacy aspect of MEC is still far from complete. In this work, a user presence inference attack that invades user privacy by exploiting the feature tasks offloaded from users is identified for MEC. Existing privacy-preserving techniques developed for other applications cannot be applied to defeat this attack in MEC, as they may disrupt the optimal task offloading scheduling and cause severe degradation in user experience. With this consideration, a novel privacy-preserving and cost-efficient (PEACE) task offloading scheme that can preserve user privacy while still ensure the best possible user experience is developed in this work based on the generic Lyapunov optimization framework. The effectiveness of the proposed scheme is validated through both analysis and simulations.