Voronoi-based spatial cloaking algorithm over road network

Abstract

Privacy preservation has recently received considerable attention in location-based services. A large number of location cloaking algorithms have been proposed for protecting the location privacy of mobile users over road networks. However, most existing cloaking approaches traverse the entire road network repetitively, which has a significant negative impact over the communication and anonymization efficiency. To address this problem, we propose a network Voronoi-based location anonymization algorithm. We employ the network Voronoi diagram to pre-divide the road network into network Voronoi cells. The problem of anonymization over global road networks is reduced to finding cloaking sets in local network Voronoi cells. Experimental results validate the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed algorithm. © 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland.