A Location Privacy-Preserving Scheme for VANETs Based on Virtual Mix Zone

Abstract

The location of vehicles, which may contain some sensitive information, is critical for VANETs security.
The literature location privacy-preserving scheme suffers from either selfish vehicle node or
vehicle density issues. In this paper, a novel location privacy-preserving scheme for VANETs is
proposed based on virtual mix zone which is created dynamically when the pseudonyms of vehicle
nodes are going to be expired. Moreover, a reputation model and mechanism is introduced to encourage
the selfish node to join the mix zone. The evaluation and analysis show that the proposed
scheme performs better than the typical ones in terms of privacy strength and energy cost.