Transmission range changing effects on location privacy-preserving schemes in the internet of vehicles

The internet of vehicles (IoV) is getting a considerable amount of attention from different research parties. IoV aims at enhancing the driving experience with its wide range of applications varying from safety, road management to entertainment; however, some of such applications bring severe security and privacy issues; identity exposing, and location tracking are good examples. By enabling vehicles to send their statuses to themselves via beacon messages, this creates an environmental awareness for safety purposes but also exposes them to the aforementioned attacks. A lot of work has been done to mitigate the effect of such attacks but still does not provide a holistic solution. In this article, which is an extension to a prior work, the authors investigate the effects of changing the transmission range while sending beacons on the achieved level of location privacy based on two location privacy schemes: SLOW and CAPS. The authors use additional privacy metrics in addition to comparing the strategies in some well-known security attacks. The outcomes confirm the feasibility of using such a mechanism.