Adaptive Grouping and Pseudonym Changing Policy for Protection of Vehicles Location Information in VANETs

Location privacy has importance in the growing technology of the vehicular network. For the efficient implementation of Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs) the significance of location privacy should be considered. Location privacy protection is mainly achieved with the help of pseudonym changing strategies in the case of VANETs. But, the pseudonym must be changed in the proper way to conceal the real identity of the vehicle. In this paper, we propose a new method of Adaptive Grouping and Pseudonym Changing (AGPC) scheme to shield real location information of vehicle users. The vehicles are grouped based on the traffic environment and condition to anonymize the vehicle in the group. The simulation results show that AGPC achieves improved average privacy strength, the anonymity set size, and pseudonym changing compared with existing techniques. AGPC also provides a balance between privacy and safety application.