Towards an Efficient Pseudonym Management and Changing Scheme for Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks

Protecting the location privacy is still one of the main challenges in Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs). Although, standardization bodies such as IEEE and ETSI have adopted the pseudonymous scheme as a solution to this problem, an efficient pseudonym changing and management is still an open issue. In this paper, we propose a complete and efficient pseudonym management and changing scheme based on Vehicular Location Privacy Zone (VLPZ). We define VLPZ as a roadside infrastructure designed to pseudonyms management and changing. This scheme considers that the vehicular geographic area is partitioned as a grid, where each cell contains one or many VLPZs. The location privacy protection level provided by the scheme depends on the VLPZ capacity and the number of vehicles that are inside it at the same time. For this reason, we also propose a reputation mechanism to stimulate vehicles to enter to the VLPZ, and finally evaluate the performances of the proposed scheme using Veins Framework based on OMNet++ network simulator and SUMO mobility. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.