Privacy-Aware Traffic Flow Prediction Based on Multi-Party Sensor Data with Zero Trust in Smart City

With the continuous increment of city volume and size, a number of traffic-related urban units (e.g., vehicles, roads, buildings, etc.) are emerging rapidly, which plays a heavy burden on the scientific traffic control of smart cities. In this situation, it is becoming a necessity to utilize the sensor data from massive cameras deployed at city crossings for accurate traffic flow prediction. However, the traffic sensor data are often distributed and stored by different organizations or parties with zero trust, which impedes the multi-party sensor data sharing significantly due to privacy concerns. Therefore, it requires challenging efforts to balance the trade-off between data sharing and data privacy to enable cross-organization traffic data fusion and prediction. In light of this challenge, we put forward an accurate LSH (locality-sensitive hashing)-based traffic flow prediction approach with the ability to protect privacy. Finally, through a series of experiments deployed on a real-world traffic dataset, we demonstrate the feasibility of our proposal in terms of prediction accuracy and efficiency while guaranteeing sensor data privacy.