DNO-RL: A Reinforcement-Learning-Based Approach to Dynamic Noise Optimization for Differential Privacy

With the globalized deployment of cross-border vehicle location services and the trajectory data, which contain user identity information and geographically sensitive features, the variability in privacy regulations in different jurisdictions can further exacerbate the technical and compliance challenges of data privacy protection. Traditional static differential privacy mechanisms struggle to accommodate spatiotemporal heterogeneity in dynamic scenarios because of the use of a fixed privacy budget parameter, leading to wasted privacy budgets or insufficient protection of sensitive regions. This study proposes a reinforcement-learning-based dynamic noise optimization method (DNO-RL) that dynamically adjusts the Laplacian noise scale by real-time sensing of vehicle density, region sensitivity, and the remaining privacy budget via a deep Q-network (DQN), with the aim of providing context-adaptive differential privacy protection for cross-border vehicle location services. Simulation experiments of cross-border scenarios based on the T-Drive dataset showed that DNO-RL reduced the average localization error by 28.3% and saved 17.9% of the privacy budget compared with the local differential privacy under the same privacy budget. This study provides a new paradigm for the dynamic privacy–utility balancing of cross-border vehicular networking services.