Transmission Range Adjustment Influence on Location Privacy-Preserving Schemes in VANETs

Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs) are in the rollout phase. VANETs are mainly instantiated to mitigate the number of crashes and fatalities by enabling an intensive beaconing that contains the fine-grained location of each vehicle at the aim of creating environmental awareness for safety purposes. However, this frequent location information may be obtained by adversaries after overhearing the beacons; giving an unauthenticated entity(s) the ability to monitor the vehicles' whereabouts in a region of interest. A lot of schemes to protect location privacy were proposed. In this paper, we provide an enhancement of a set of schemes by allowing vehicles to adjust their beacon transmission range to conditionally avoid tracking. For the best of our knowledge, and excluding the scopes other than location privacy in VANETs, this is the first evaluation of transmission adjustment influence on the achieved location privacy. We made an evaluation of this feature's performances after integrating it into some of the well-known strategies, namely: SLOW and CAPS, against (1) the achieved location privacy using the traceability metric and (2) the network performances. The results show the beneficial usability of such a feature.