A Privacy-Preserving Location-Aware and Traffic Order-Based Route Collection Scheme in VANETs

Collecting driving routes is effective in predicting traffic patterns and alleviating traffic jams. However, due to the sensitivity of the location information, drivers are usually reluctant to share their route information. Although some efforts have been made to address this challenge, most of them either do not consider traffic order issues or fall short of achieving practical efficiency. In this paper, we propose an efficient and privacy-preserving route collection scheme, named EPRC, to solve the above-mentioned problems. The main idea of EPRC is to perform location-aware and traffic order-based route aggregation on drivers' encrypted data using super-increasing sequences and a homomorphic encryption cryptosystem. The proposed scheme achieves better computation and communication efficiency by reducing computational complexity and communication overhead from O(M) to O(1), where M denotes the number of road segments. Security analysis demonstrates the privacy of an individual driver's route is preserved under standard cryptographic assumptions. Performance evaluations via implementing EPRC on mobile devices and systems show EPRC's efficiency in terms of computation and communication costs.