Achieving configural location privacy in location based routing for MANET

Research shows that location based routing can improve the performance and efficiency of communication in mobile ad hoc networks. From another point of view, disclosure of location information can cause a serious privacy risk, especially in environments where different groups of nodes cannot fully trust each other. In this paper, we propose a protocol through which a wireless node can achieve configurable location privacy by distributing location information with different levels of perturbations to different groups of nodes. To achieve this goal, polynomial based personal keys are deployed for group based location information access. A modified location based routing protocol with privacy awareness features is introduced. Authentication mechanisms are designed to protect the genuineness of location information and prevent impersonation attacks. The efficiency and safety of the proposed approach are investigated.