A new grid-based cloaking scheme for continuous queries in centralized LBS systems

Abstract

Recent development in wireless communication technology and mobile equipment is making location-based services (LBSs) more popular day by day. However, because users continuously send queries to a server by using their exact locations in the LBSs, private information can be in danger. Therefore, a mechanism for users' privacy protection is required for the safe and comfortable use of LBSs. For this, we, in this paper, propose a grid-based cloaking area creation scheme in order to support continuous queries in LBSs. Our scheme creates a cloaking area rapidly by using grid-based cell expansion to efficiently support the continuous LBSs. In addition, to generate a cloaking area which lowers the exposure probability of a mobile user to a minimum level, our scheme computes a privacy protection degree by granting weights to the mobile users. Finally, we show from our performance analysis that our cloaking scheme shows better performance than the existing cloaking scheme. © 2013 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht(Outside the USA).