LPS for LBS: Location-Privacy scheme for location-based services

A Vehicular Ad-hoc Network (VANET) is a type of Mobile Ad-hoc Network (MANET) that is used to provide communications between nearby vehicles on a hand, and between vehicles and fixed infrastructure on the roadside on the other hand. VANET is not only used for road safety and driving comfort but also for infotainment. An application area which is expected to greatly benefit from this advanced technology is Location Based Service (LBS): a service which helps users in finding nearby places. However, this application raises a privacy issue for these users since it can profile them and track their physical location. Therefore, to successfully deploy LBS, user´s privacy is one of major challenges that must be addressed. In this paper, we propose a location privacy protection scheme to encourage drivers to use this service without any risk of being pursued. Our system was implemented using NS2 network simulator and found to achieve high values of anonymity.