Pass and run: A privacy preserving delay tolerant network communication protocol for CyberVehicles

Roadside infrastructure is becoming an important platform for information collection and dissemination. However, when a vehicle communicates with roadside infrastructure, it will leave a trace of its location information on the roadside units (RSUs) it communicates with, over time. These traces may reveal some private information about the vehicle such as driving patterns. In this paper, we consider a privacy protection problem where the goal is to preserve the individual vehicle's location information during its communication with the RSUs. We propose to consider vehicles as a delay tolerant network (DTN) where the network nodes (vehicles) are connected through vehicle-to-vehicle communication. Packets that contain information that the vehicle want to exchange with roadside infrastructure will be passed around the DTN before they eventually reach RSUs in order to preserve the vehicle location privacy. We propose metrics for vehicle location privacy and verify with real life data that the proposed pass and run communication protocol can provide excellent location privacy.