A Privacy-Preserving Localization Scheme with Node Selection in Mobile Networks

Localization in mobile networks has been widely applied in many scenarios. However, an entity responsible for location estimation exposes both the target and anchors to potential location leakage at any time, creating serious security risks. Although existing studies have proposed privacy-preserving localization algorithms, they still face challenges of insufficient positioning accuracy and excessive communication overhead. In this article, we propose a privacy-preserving localization scheme, named PPLZN. PPLZN protects protects the location privacy of both the target and anchor nodes in crowdsourced localization. Simulation results validate the effectiveness of PPLZN. Evidently, it can achieve accurate position estimation without location leakage and outperform state-of-the-art approaches in both positioning accuracy and communication overhead. In addition, PPLZN significantly reduces computational and communication overhead in large-scale deployments, making it well-fitted for practical privacy-preserving localization in resource-constrained networks.