Experimental privacy analysis and characterization for disconnected VANETs

Abstract

Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) are special applications of Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs) for road safety and efficient traffic management. A major challenge for ITS and VANETs in all its flavours is ensuring the privacy of vehicle drivers and the transmitted location information. One attribute of ITS during its early roll-out stage especially in rural areas and challenged environments is low vehicle density and lack of end-to-end connectivity akin to the attribute of Vehicular Delay Tolerant Networks (VDTNs). This means that contact duration between network entities such as vehicles and road-side units (RSUs) are short-lived. Three popular solutions are the use of pseudonyms, mixzones, and group communication. Privacy schemes based on the mixzone technique abound for more conventional VANETs. A critical privacy analysis of such scenarios will be key to the design of privacy techniques for intermittent networks. We are not aware of any work that analyse the privacy problem in intermittent VANTEs. In this paper, we add our voice to efforts to characterize the privacy problem in disconnected VANETs.