Privacy preserving network control for multi-hop communications

Abstract

We consider the problem of resource allocation and control of multihop networks in which multiple source-destination pairs communicate confidential messages, privately from the intermediate nodes. We pose the problem as that of network utility maximization, into which privacy is incorporated as an additional quality of service constraint. We develop a simple, and yet provably optimal dynamic control algorithm which combines flow control, routing and end-to-end private encoding. In order to achieve privacy, our scheme exploits multipath diversity and temporal diversity due to channel variability. Our end-to-end dynamic encoding scheme encodes private messages over many packets, to be combined at the ultimate destination for recovery. We also evaluated our scheme numerically under various conditions to show its efficacy.