Efficient Privacy-Preserving Scheme for Real-Time Location Data in Vehicular Ad-Hoc Network

The development of vehicular ad-hoc network (VANET) allows vehicle users to enjoy location-based services through the network at any time and place. However, it also raises location privacy issues. Privacy-preservation of large amounts real-time location data is a critical issue. Existing research work, such as the mix-zone scheme, has protected users' location privacy and driving routes to a certain extent. However, existing schemes have some deficiencies in security and efficiency. This paper presents a novel location privacy protection scheme. Vehicles can generate virtual locations dynamically based on the situation of surrounding vehicles to provide misleading information regarding the driving route and thus achieve location privacy. We use entropy of anonymity set and tracking success ratio as metrics to measure the level of privacy-preserving. Simulation experiments have been carried out to compare with other existing schemes. The results show that entropy of anonymity set in our scheme is 100% larger than the compared scheme and the tracking success ratio has decreased from 10% to 1%. So, the results illustrate that the proposed scheme offers better security and location-based services.