The main purpose of designing Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs) is to achieve safety by periodically broadcasting the vehicle's coordinates with a high precision. This advantage brings a threat represented in the possible tracking and identification of the vehicles. A possible solution is to use pseudonyms instead of real identities. However, even by changing pseudonyms, the vehicle can still be tracked if the adversary has knowledge about the potential start and end points of a particular driver who has social interactions (e.g., with neighbors) which introduces the concept of Vehicular Social Networks (VSNs). In this work we propose a location privacy scheme, namely: Extreme Points Privacy (EPP) for trips and home identification in VSNs by exploiting the nature of the end points that are common between many VSN users bringing the option to create shared zones to anonymize these users. An analytical study accompanied by a simulation using the realistic vehicular traffic mobility generator SUMO are presented to show the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.

The main purpose of designing vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs) is to achieve safety by periodically broadcasting the vehicle's coordinates with a high precision. This advantage brings a threat represented in the possible tracking and identification of the vehicles. A possible solution is to use and change pseudonyms. However, even by changing pseudonyms, the vehicle could still be tracked if the adversary has a prior knowledge about the potential start and end points of a particular driver who has social interactions (e.g., with neighbors) which introduces the concept of vehicular social networks (VSNs). This article extends the authors previous work, namely: “EPP Extreme Points Privacy for Trips and Home Identification in Vehicular Social Networks,” which exploits the nature of the end points that are common between VSN users in order to create shared zones to anonymize them. The extension is represented by (a) the evaluation of the enjoyed location privacy of VSN users after quitting the district in addition to (b) detailing the used environment during the evaluation.

The model of the territorial process developed by the Italian school of process-based typology is founded on the stratification of historical phases according to a principle of organicity, through which the different anthropic structures are linked to each other, as well as to the natural structure, by relations of necessity. The application of this model for interpreting the territorial process of the mountains of Ouled Nail and Djebel Amour in Algeria encountered several difficulties because of its steppe nature dedicated to the movement of populations. Thus, the notion of historical phase has difficulty in revealing itself with as much clarity as in the theoretical model, because of the incomplete and therefore heterogeneous occupations.