A Review of Pseudonym Change Strategies for Location Privacy Preservation Schemes in Vehicular Networks

Location privacy protection in vehicular networks has been a primary priority to ensure because of its direct impact on human physical safety. Leakage and violation of road users’ location privacy may be perilous beyond simple curiosity as it may scale to cyber-stalking and tracking. This may lead to road users being subjected to mental and physical distress, from blackmailing to targeted advertising, and trap planning. The results of tracking may be fatal to road users. Over the past 17 years, researchers have been actively investigating location privacy protection mechanisms for vehicular networks. Numerous research results have been published that examined the use of pseudonym change strategies which have been considered as the most appropriate solution that maintains the trade-off between ease of application, good protection level and the correct functionality of the network. We evaluate, classify, and analyze pseudonym change strategies aimed at location privacy preserving solutions for vehicular networks and discuss their performance. We also review the simulation tools used for evaluating pseudonym change techniques used in location privacy preserving solutions for the vehicular environment. The results of this survey will help researchers in this field to develop more robust, efficient, and cost-effective location privacy protection schemes in the future.