UCLA

The oncoming data explosion of the Internet of Things, and in particular the Internet of Vehicles, has led to placing computation near the data, as opposed to backhauling large amounts of data to the Internet cloud. This type of edge networking provides efficiency gains; however, mobile edge networking must also be resilient in disruptive networks as well as provide security and privacy protection.

In this thesis, we address both challenges, namely support efficient and robust communications at the network edge, even in disruptive connectivity conditions; and in the same conditions, maintain decentralized, private, confidential exchanges. First, we introduce the concept of Information Centric Networks (ICNs), an increasingly popular strategy for wireless edge scenarios and describe how caching and Network Coding can improve performance in disruptive wireless connectivity environments. Secondly, we introduce a privacy mechanism for mobile data that improves the privacy strength while preserving utility. That is, we perform query expansion to reduce the information leakage due to an individual's participation.