Human Behavior and Challenges of Anonymizing WLAN Traces

With the wide spread deployment of Wireless LANs (WLANs), it is becoming necessary to conduct analysis of libraries of measurements taken from such operational networks. The availability of these trace libraries can be quite useful to provide realistic models of network load and user mobility, among others. To maintain user privacy, techniques of trace anonymization may be used to hide information. This paper proposes to study the fundamental trade off between the utility of WLAN traces and its privacy.