PEUC-WiN: Privacy Enhancement by User Cooperation in Wireless Networks

Location awareness capabilities of today's wireless networks provide position tailored services but, at the same time, impose serious privacy implications for the wireless users. Interface identifiers allow an adversary to trace a user's movement and location over time in a wireless environment. This causes a significant privacy threat to users, since an adversary could learn a lot of information about them from their locations. Current proposed location privacy mechanisms suffer from a high rate of network disruption and degraded throughput. In this paper, we introduce a new scheme to improve the location privacy of wireless users while minimizing network disruption. The proposed scheme achieves its goals by exploiting the collaboration among users in the same coverage area of an access point in a wireless system.