Utilizing social links for location privacy in opportunistic delay-tolerant networks

This paper is concerned with improving location-privacy for users accessing location-based services in opportunistic DTNs. We design a protocol that offers location privacy through request/reply location obfuscation technique that uses the nodes' own social network to drive the forwarding heuristic. We propose a fully distributed social-based location privacy protocol (SLPD) that utilizes social ties between nodes to ensure K-Anonymity, i.e. the requesting node's locations cannot be determined from at least k-1 other nodes in its social network. We evaluate SLPD using extensive simulations and real connectivity data traces. We compare our results to a benchmark protocol that requires centralized trusted server. We show that our distributed protocol is applicable to DTNs with various mobility patterns, and provides the user with the required privacy at less than 30% of the privacy range we define. SLPD achieves success ratios similar to the ones obtained using centralized benchmark solutions up to 15% privacy requirements.