A secure privacy-preserving hierarchical location service for mobile ad hoc networks

Recently, position-based routing has proven to be a scalable and efficient way for packet routing in mobile ad hoc networks. To enable position-based routing, a node must be able to discover the location of the intended destination node. This can typically be accomplished by a location service. By far there have been many efficient location service algorithms such as the DREAM, RLS, Homezone, GLS, DLM and HLS, but most of them have focused on the scalability and efficiency of algorithm while the security and privacy issues were vastly neglected. In this article, we propose a secure privacy-preserving hierarchical location service (SPPHLS) based on the HLS algorithm using the broadcast encryption scheme and broadcast authentication scheme. In the proposed secure location service scheme, the position privacy of nodes is protected and the security is promised. Finally, through simulation and analysis, we further show that the proposed scheme only introduces very moderate success rate degradation and query delay compared to the original HLS algorithm.