Virtual Location Generation for Location Privacy Protection in VANET

Thanks to the wide development of the vehicular ad-hoc network (VANET), users can enjoy diverse location-based services (LBSs) on route. However, these LBSs also bring location privacy issues, which seriously threaten the personal privacy of VANET users. This paper aims at protecting the location privacy of VANET users by proposing a virtual location generation scheme. A VANET user reports a virtual location generated by our scheme instead of its actual location to the LBS server. The quality of service (Qos) loss metric and the location privacy metric are designed to evaluate the performance of the proposed scheme in a quantitative way. Numerical analysis is conducted and the impacts of different parameters on the performance of the scheme are analyzed.