Providing location privacy for online services in vehicular ad hoc networks

Communications through road side units in vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) can be used to track the location of vehicles, which makes serious threat on users' privacy. In this paper, we address the problem of location tracking for online service access and the privacy enhancement in VANETs. Firstly, by considering the unique characteristics of VANETs, we propose an anonymous online service access (AOSA) protocol. Secondly, we analytically evaluate the anonymity and the unlinkability of the proposed protocol. Finally, a series of simulation studies are conducted to evaluate the performance of our protocol in the real VANET environments such as Manhattan and urban scenarios. According to analytical evaluation and simulations, our protocol provides higher level of anonymity and location privacy by providing larger anonymity set and smaller tracking probability for online service access applications. Simulation results further show that our protocol is feasible and produce better performance in real VANET environments by producing higher success ratio and smaller delay.