PPBR: Privacy-Aware Position-Based Routing in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Position-based routing for Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks is a promising approach to reduce route overhead by using the location information of each node. However, in most of the previously reported position-based routing protocols, a node has to periodically broadcast its current position coordinates and identifiers to its one-hop neighbors. Such information could be easily eavesdropped on by an adversary if it is not protected, and consequently, location privacy would be violated. In this paper, we propose a novel privacy-aware position-based routing protocol (PPBR), in which a node takes dynamic pseudo identifiers instead of its real identity in advertising its position. Furthermore, PPBR provides end-to-end anonymity to any intermediate nodes along the route. The theoretical analysis shows that the probability of tracking a node under PPBR through traffic analysis would be very small. We compare the performance of PPBR with that by GPSR and AODV through extensive simulation, which demonstrates the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed scheme. We also show that frequent update of the pseudo identifier of each node yields an insignificant impact on routing performance and overhead.