Location tracking prevention with dummy messages for vehicular communications

Abstract

In emerging vehicular communication systems, each vehicle periodically broadcasts safety messages, which contains various vehicle parameters such as location and velocity. While safety messages are designed for advanced road safety and traffic efficiency, a significant concern is that eavesdroppers can track the vehicle's trajectory. In particular, this tracking is easily performed in low vehicle density environments. To address this location privacy issue, we propose a location privacy protection method in such environments using dummy node messages. In our approach, from an eavesdropper's view, the vehicle density is increased by the generation of dummy node messages. Simulation results show that our proposed method reduces tracking probability in high/low vehicle density environments.