Anonymous service access for Vehicular Ad hoc Networks

Communications through road side units in Vehicular Ad hoc Networks (VANETs) can be used to track the location of vehicles, which makes serious threat on users´ privacy. In this paper, we propose and evaluate a novel location privacy enhancement protocol for VANETs. Firstly, we propose an Anonymous Online Service Access (AOSA) protocol. Secondly, we analytically evaluate the anonymity and the unlinkability of the proposed protocol. Finally, a series of simulation studies are conducted to evaluate the performance of our protocol in the real VANET environments such as Manhattan and Urban scenarios. According to analytical evaluation and simulations, our protocol provides higher level of anonymity and location privacy for on-line service access applications. Simulation results further show that our protocol is feasible and produces better performance in real VANET environments by producing higher success ratio and smaller delay.