Preserving the Location Privacy of Drivers Using Transmission Range Changing Techniques in Internet of Vehicles

Internet of Vehicles (IoV) had remarkably enhanced the road -safety. Thanks to the environment sensing feature provided by the embedded devices and sensors. Nevertheless, this benignant feature had also introduced privacy issues; as vehicles spread their fine-grained locations at the aim of fulfilling safety requirements, adversaries can use this latter to track and identify the IoV users. Different privacy schemes and techniques are designed and evaluated like the mix-zone, encryption, groups forming, and silent-period based techniques. However, the majority do suffer from serious limitations inherited from the technique itself. In this paper, we propose a safety-friendly location privacy-preserving scheme, WHISPER, that adjusts the transmission range of vehicles on-the-fly in order to, occasionally, escape the continuous location tracking. We detail the protocols used by WHISPER, then we compare it against other privacy- preserving schemes using different metrics. The results show that WHISPER outperformed the other schemes after giving better location privacy levels while still keeping the road-safety fulfilled.