Location Privacy Preservation in VANET using Mix Zones – A survey

A Vehicular Networks are intelligent transportation system which provides data dissemination, and traffic management services. In VANETs, privacy is the major issue in safety-related application. It becomes a challenging problem to maintain the privacy of the vehicle and the user. To avoid linking of messages which is sent between the vehicles in the network, many privacy schemes utilizes pseudonym changing mechanism. But the beacons containing spatiotemporal information makes the vehicle vulnerable to attacks and privacy is breached. Hence, preserving the context of privacy is a major challenge in the vehicular network. In order to enhance the privacy, mix zone is considered as the optimal method among pseudonym changing mechanism. The mix zones are created by multiple numbers of vehicles that concurrently change their pseudonym to admit uncertainty to the malevolent competitors such that it turns into inaccessible for them to extract the cooperation between the current and former pseudonyms employed by the vehicles. This paper reviews various pseudonym strategies and mix zone schemes for privacy preservation.