ALPINE: Closed-Loop Adaptive Privacy Budget Allocation for Mobile Edge Crowdsensing

TL;DR

ALPINE is a closed-loop framework that adaptively allocates privacy budgets in mobile edge crowdsensing, balancing privacy, utility, and overhead in real-time under dynamic conditions.

Contribution

It introduces a risk-aware, adaptive privacy budget allocation method using a TD3 policy, improving privacy-utility trade-offs in mobile edge crowdsensing.

Findings

ALPINE outperforms baseline methods in privacy-utility trade-offs.

It reduces attack effectiveness against membership, property inference, and reconstruction.

The framework incurs modest runtime overhead on resource-constrained devices.

Abstract

Mobile edge crowdsensing (MECS) enables large-scale real-time sensing services, but its continuous data collection and transmission pipeline exposes terminal devices to dynamic privacy risks. Existing privacy protection schemes in MECS typically rely on static configurations or coarse-grained adaptation, making them difficult to balance privacy, data utility, and device overhead under changing channel conditions, data sensitivity, and resource availability. To address this problem, we propose ALPINE, a lightweight closed-loop framework for adaptive privacy budget allocation in MECS. ALPINE performs multi-dimensional risk perception on terminal devices by jointly modeling channel, semantic, contextual, and resource risks, and maps the resulting risk state to a privacy budget through an offline-trained TD3 policy. The selected budget is then used to drive local differential privacy perturbation before data transmission, while edge-side privacy-utility evaluation provides feedback for policy switching and periodic refinement. In this way, ALPINE forms a terminal-edge collaborative control loop that enables real-time, risk-adaptive privacy protection with low online overhead. Extensive experiments on multiple real-world datasets show that ALPINE achieves a better privacy-utility trade-off than representative baselines, reduces the effectiveness of membership inference, property inference, and reconstruction attacks, and preserves robust downstream task performance under dynamic risk conditions. Prototype deployment further demonstrates that ALPINE introduces only modest runtime overhead on resource-constrained devices.