ABSTRACT:

The increasing availability of location-aware mobile devices has given rise to a flurry of location-based mostly services (LBS). Due to the nature of spatial queries, an LBS needs the user position so as to process her requests. On the opposite hand, revealing exact user locations to a (doubtless untrusted) LBS might pinpoint their identities and breach their privacy. To address this issue, spatial anonymity techniques obfuscate user locations, forwarding to the LBS a sufficiently large region instead. Existing strategies explicitly target processing within the Euclidean space, and don't apply when proximity to the users is defined according to network distance (e.g., driving time through the roads of a city). In this paper, we tend to propose a framework for anonymous question processing in road networks. We style location obfuscation techniques that (i) give anonymous LBS access to the users, and (ii) allow economical question processing at the LBS side. Our techniques exploit existing network database infrastructure, requiring no specialised storage schemes or functionalities. We have a tendency to experimentally compare various designs in real road networks and demonstrate the effectiveness of our techniques.