Preserving Privacy in Social City Networks via Small Cells

An increasingly large amount of small cells – e.g. WiFi hotspots – is being deployed in residential areas to connect a plethora of smart devices to the Internet. In this paper, we present a social city network leveraging small cells for sharing content geographically and temporarily whilst preserving the privacy of its users. Unlike a social network built around friends, we propose a social city network addressing geographically co-located people and smart objects, e.g. residing in a street, on a square, around a building, etc. Our goal is to facilitate interaction with smart cities by easily sharing short-lived data fragments with others in a given area and for a limited time span. To this end, we designed an architecture in which small cells deliver location proofs that grant access to location-restricted content.