A dual-active spatial cloaking algorithm for location privacy preserving in mobile peer-to-peer networks

Very often, network users expect to access services relevant to their locations, whilst preserve their privacy without disclose their exact locations. The well-known privacy preserving method is the spatial cloaking technique where exact user locations are blurred into a cloaked region to meet the privacy requirement, e.g. k-anonymity. Most of current solutions are designed with a centralized architecture in mind and rely on a third trustworthy party, i.e. a location anonymizing server (LAS). Unfortunately, these solutions cannot be directly applied to the mobile peer-to-peer (P2P) networks where no centralized servers are possible. In this paper, we present a dual-active spatial cloaking algorithm for mobile P2P networks. The key difference between the suggested algorithm and two existing algorithms, on-demand and proactive, is that: our algorithm allows peers not only actively collect but also actively disseminate location information to others. The three approaches are assessed through extensive simulation experiments for a range of P2P network scenarios. The experimental result shows that the dual-active approach uses the least anonymizing time and has the best anonymization success rate at the price of acceptable communicating cost. © 2012 IEEE