SLOW-Based Pseudonym Changing Schemes for Location Privacy in Vehicular Networks

Location privacy is a critical aspect of vehicular networks. Privacy schemes adopt diverse methods to minimize vehicle traceability. These schemes include pseudonym periodical changes, silent periods, context-based approaches, and cooperative pseudonym changes. It is important to maintain a discontinuity in the information sent by the vehicle to avoid reconstructing the vehicle trace. In this paper, we propose three privacy schemes that use SLOW as a baseline and combine it with other techniques: SLOW-based random silent periods, SLOW-based cooperative pseudonym change, and SLOW-based context-aware privacy scheme. These proposed schemes aim to enhance the original scheme by restricting their operations with intervals and thresholds and improving the management of silent periods. We evaluate the proposed schemes' performance in terms of traceability, computation time, pseudonym usage, and silence time. Results show that our schemes improve the original scheme in most tested metrics. The average improvement in traceability is 70%. Furthermore, our schemes reduce the silent period of the SLOW scheme by 17.40% on average.