An incentive-based co-operation motivating pseudonym changing strategy for privacy preservation in mixed zones in vehicular networks

Abstract

Location privacy of the vehicles is considered as the potential information that needs to be protected with maximum care in the vehicular network. This location privacy depends on the method of the pseudonym strategy scheme adopted in the mix zone of vehicular networks. The maximum degree of privacy is required in the mixed zone because the decentralization and lower vehicular density of vehicles in the mixed zone have the maximum probability of reducing the strength of facilitating location privacy. However, location privacy in the mixed zone depends on the number of cooperative vehicles interacting within the spatio temporal environment. In this paper, an incentive-based co-operation motivating pseudonym changing strategy for privacy preservation in mixed zones is proposed for resolving the issue of pseudonym change and influence of cooperative vehicle density. This proposed mechanism uses a one-way hash function and an improved pseudonym scheme for estimating vehicular incentives in order to facilitate privacy protection. The extensive investigation of the proposed mechanism is confirmed to be excellent in terms of location privacy under different distances, a number of vehicles and the number of mixed zones compared to the pseudonym changing privacy preservation schemes proposed for addressing privacy in mixed zones of vehicular networks.