Evaluation of a Hybrid Method of User Location Anonymization

Recently, highly accurate positioning devices enable us to provide various types of location based services (LBS). Since location information may reveal private information, preserving location privacy has become a significant issue in LBS. Lots of different techniques for securing the location privacy have been proposed, for instance the concept of Silent period, the concept of Dummy node, and the concept of Cloaking-region. However, many of these researches have a problem that quality of the LBS (QoS) decreased when anonymity is improved, and anonymity falls down when QoS is improved. In this paper, we present a node density-based location anonymization scheme which can provide location privacy by utilizing hybrid concept of Dummy node and Cloaking-region. Simulation is conducted to evaluate our proposed method in the view point of the location error in LBS and the probability of tracking of a target node. Simulation results show that the probability of tracking of a target node by an adversary is reduced and the QoS of LBS is also improved.