Privacy Preservation by Local Design in Cooperative Networked Control Systems

Abstract: In this paper, we study the privacy preservation problem in a cooperative networked control system working for the task of LQG control. The system consists of a user and a server: the user owns the state process, the server provides computation capability, and the user employs the server to compute control inputs for it. To enable the server's computation, the user needs to provide the measurements of the process states to the server. However, the user regards the states as privacy and wants the server to have deviated knowledge of the state estimates rather than the true value. Regarding that, we propose a novel local design of privacy preservation, which creates a deviation in the server's knowledge of the state estimates from the true value. Meanwhile, we propose an associated privacy metric to measure the deviation and analyze the privacy performance accordingly. Furthermore, we analyze the service loss in the LQG control performance caused by the privacy scheme. Finally, we study the performance trade-off between the privacy preservation and the LQG control, where the proposed optimization problems are solved by numerical methods efficiently.