Mix-zones Deployment for Location Privacy Preservation in Vehicular Communications

Location privacy is a main concern in vehicular communications where vehicles have to broadcast traffic routine information frequently. A promising approach to prevent a vehicle from been tracked suggests vehicle to change pseudonyms in regions called mix-zones, where the adversary cannot eavesdrop the vehicular communication. However, the deployment problem of mix-zones has not been well addressed in previously reported works. In this paper, we propose a statistics-based metric for evaluating and locating a mix-zone. Furthermore, a cost-efficient mix-zones deployment scheme is presented to guarantee that vehicles at any place can pass through an effective mix-zone in certain driving time (DT), and the extra overhead time (ET) of adjusting routes to across the mix-zone is small. Finally, several deployment examples are given for a real-world map.