Location Privacy Protection Considering the Location Safety

With rapid advances in mobile communication technologies and continued price reduction of location tracking devices, location-based services (LBSs) are widely recognized as an important feature of the future computing environment. Though LBSs provide many new opportunities, the ability to locate mobile users also presents new threats - the intrusion of location privacy. Lots of different techniques for securing the location privacy have been proposed, for instance the concept of Silent period, the concept of Dummy node, and the concept of Cloaking-region. However, many of these researches have a problem that quality of the LBS (QoS) decreased when anonymity is improved, and anonymity falls down when QoS is improved. In this paper, we propose a location privacy scheme by utilizing the cloaking region and the regional safety degree. The regional safety degree means the measure of the needs of the anonymity of the location information. If the node is in the place of high regional safety, the node does not need any anonymization. The proposed method is evaluated by the quality of location information and the location safety. The location safety is calculated by multiplying the regional safety degree and the identification level. From our simulation results, the proposed method improves the quality of the location information without the degradation of the location safety.