Location Privacy, Application Overhead and Congestion in VANET Location Based Services

Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) may one day improve vehicle safety and traffic management, but VANETs raise location privacy concerns because they would transmit data which could also be used for unwanted surveillance. Some location privacy researchers have proposed application-layer protocols that would require dummy event communications which may lead to network congestion and/or location based service overhead. This research investigates the degree of additional network congestion and overhead resulting from these protocols.