A survey of privacy-preserving offloading methods in mobile-edge computing

By moving computing resources to the network logical edge, mobile edge computing is promising for providing low-latency computing services to mobile users, and task offloading is one of its key enabling techniques. However, serious privacy concerns come along with offloading, due to the vulnerability of edge servers and the wireless transmission feature. Although many research efforts have been devoted to privacy-preserving offloading in recent years, there still lacks a comprehensive survey to systematically review these pioneering works. With this consideration, a thorough review for the state-of-the-art on this topic is provided in this work. Specifically, the privacy issues in offloading as well as the related metrics and application scenarios are discussed first. Then, based on their associated offloading phases, existing privacy-preserving offloading methods are classified into three categories: managing offloading data and pattern, secure transmission of offloaded data, and offloading destination selection. Finally, potential future directions of privacy-preserving offloading are discussed.