A Group Leader Location Hiding Technique for VANETs

Vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) is one of the most promising and emerging communication technologies that could definitely lead to significant improvements in the traffic management and safety. Location privacy is a critical requirement in VANET, since location information may be shared between vehicles to support the VANET applications. Therefore, it is crucial to protect the location of users. In this paper, we propose a location privacy protection technique that utilises the shadow concept and takes into consideration the reliability in protecting the group leader location, which would basically provide the needed anonymity and protection for the location information targeted by global adversaries. The performance of the proposed technique has been investigated through simulation and compared against the well-known AOSA technique. The results from extensive simulations have shown that the proposed technique enhances the anonymity of the group leader vehicle by reducing the time that the global adversaries can use in collecting location information.