A Location Privacy-Preserving Scheme for VANETs Based on Virtual Mix Zone

Abstract

The location of vehicles, which may contain some sensitive information, is critical for VANETs security.The literature location privacy-preserving scheme suffers from either selfish vehicle node orvehicle density issues. In this paper, a novel location privacy-preserving scheme for VANETs isproposed based on virtual mix zone which is created dynamically when the pseudonyms of vehiclenodes are going to be expired. Moreover, a reputation model and mechanism is introduced to encouragethe selfish node to join the mix zone. The evaluation and analysis show that the proposedscheme performs better than the typical ones in terms of privacy strength and energy cost.