Location Privacy Protection in Contention Based Forwarding for VANETs

Compared to traditional wireless network routing protocols, geographic routing provides superior scalability and thus is widely used in vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs). However, it requires every vehicle to broadcast its location information to its neighboring nodes, and this process will compromise user's location privacy. Existing solutions to this problem can be categorized into two groups: 1) hiding user's location or 2) preserving user's identification information in routing protocols, which drastically reduce network performances. To address this issue, we proposed a dummy-based location privacy protection (DBLPP) routing protocol, in which routing decision is made based upon the dummy distance to the destination (DOD), instead of users' true locations. In this scheme, users' true locations and identification information are preserved, so the user's location privacy is protected. Compared to existing solutions, simulation results show that while DBLPP provides similar network performances as other routing protocols, it achieves a higher level of location privacy protection on vehicles in networks.