Personalized Location Privacy Protection for Location-Based Services in Vehicular Networks

Location-based services (LBSs) are widely used in vehicular networks. Privacy leakage from LBS is a key issue to be solved. However, the existing schemes fail to provide differentiated protection for users’ different locations, which may lead to the leakage of location information. In this paper, we propose a personalized location privacy protection scheme based on differential privacy to protect the privacy of location-based services in vehicular networks. Firstly, we propose a normalized decision matrix to describe the efficiency and the privacy effect of navigation recommendations. We then establish a utility model integrated with users’ privacy preferences to compute the effective driving route. Secondly, for different service request locations in the driving route, we define sensitivity distance as an index to quantify their privacy requirements. The privacy budget will be added to the service request location to generate a false location. Moreover, due to the limitation of road range in the driving route, if the privacy budget value allocated is small enough, the false location generated by the Plane Laplace will be deviated. As a result, the attacker can deduce users’ real request locations. Consequently, considering the factors of trajectory leakage, attack strategy and QoS, we establish a multi-objective optimization model to optimize the false location. Based on the real data set, we conduct a series of comparison simulations to evaluate the performance of the proposed scheme. The experimental results demonstrate that our scheme can satisfy users’ personalized services needs and provide an optimal solution to privacy and QoS.