Enabling Location Privacy Preservation in MANETs Based on Distance, Angle, and Spatial Cloaking

Preserving the location privacy of users in Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANETs) is a significant challenge for location information. Most of the conventional Location Privacy Preservation (LPP) methods protect the privacy of the user while sacrificing the capability of retrieval on the server-side, that is, legitimate devices except the user itself cannot retrieve the location in most cases. On the other hand, applications such as geographic routing and location verification require the retrievability of locations on the access point, the base station, or a trusted server. Besides, with the development of networking technology such as caching technology, it is expected that more and more distributed location-based services will be deployed, which results in the risk of leaking location information in the wireless channel. Therefore, preserving location privacy in wireless channels without losing the retrievability of the real location is essential. In this paper, by focusing on the wireless channel, we propose a novel LPP enabled by distance (ranging result), angle, and the idea of spatial cloaking (DSC-LPP) to preserve location privacy in MANETs. DSC-LPP runs without the trusted third party nor the traditional cryptography tools in the line-of-sight environment, and it is suitable for MANETs such as the Internet of Things, even when the communication and computation capabilities of users are limited. Qualitative evaluation indicates that DSC-LPP can reduce the communication overhead when compared with k-anonymity, and the computation overhead of DSC-LPP is limited when compared with conventional cryptography. Meanwhile, the retrievability of DSC-LPP is higher than that of k-anonymity and differential privacy. Simulation results show that with the proper design of spatial divisions and parameters, other legitimate devices in a MANET can correctly retrieve the location of users with a high probability when adopting DSC-LPP.