Using group anonymity to hide the identity of VoIP mobile users communicating over hybrid networks while preserving quality of service.

Security and privacy have become critical in computer networks, especially with the emergence of E-commerce. Other than securing the transfer of data, users are interested in protecting their profile privacy against exposure attacks. Multimedia communications are at the core of new information and communication technologies. We seek to achieve end users' profile privacy without violating the Quality of Service constraints on the throughput, end-to-end delay, and jitter, as these parameters represent the critical factors in multimedia applications. We propose an end-to-end anonymity design that takes into consideration the constraints of Voice-over-IP applications in a hybrid network environment, which involves ad hoc and infrastructure networks. Using clusterheads for communication anonymity to preserve user profile privacy, as well as encryption of the real-time protocol payload, we prove using analysis and simulations that our model can be easily integrated into currently deployed network infrastructures. Copyright (C) 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.