An Enhanced Location Scattering Based Privacy Protection Scheme

Consumer privacy-preserving is a major concern in location-based services (LBSs). The paramount problem in LBSs is the disclosure of a user’s actual location while interacting with the location-based service provider (LSP). To address this issue, some privacy-preserving mechanisms introduce a trusted middle entity (TME) between a user and the LSP. However, a TME could be compromised, thus posing a serious privacy threat to user’s information. In this paper, we propose a novel dummy location scattering scheme (DLSS) to protect the location privacy of a user. Specifically, DLSS employs a dummy location generation technique to reduce the risk of location information exposure to untrusted entities. In addition, a pseudonym-based mechanism and a time delay technique are adopted to further improve the privacy of a user. We conducted extensive experiments with randomly generated users’ location to evaluate the robustness of our proposed scheme. When the number of users are increased to 300, the computation time of the proposed scheme is below 105 ms. Even for the larger number of points of interest (POIs) (>2000), the computation time is below 1500 ms in comparison with other existing schemes. Simulation results show that the proposed DLSS preserves privacy at low computation time and communication cost in comparison with the existing schemes.