On-demand Pseudonym Systems in Geo-Distributed Mobile Cloud Computing

Geo-distributed mobile cloud computing (GMCC) integrates location information into mobile cloud computing, that has high potential for a large variety of applications. In a vehicular environment, a GMCC provides a large number of resources to vehicles that are geographically close to them. However, there are few studies that focus on security and privacy issues in a GMCC scenario. Vehicles need sufficient pseudonyms to periodically change for privacy preservation. In this paper, we focus on pseudonym management in GMCC system for vehicular environment. We design a three-layer on-demand pseudonym system to manage the pseudonyms. Moreover, we propose a secure pseudonym distribution scheme for secure communication among vehicles. As the number of demanded pseudonyms varies with traffic loads in different clouds, we use a newsvendor model to address the optimal on-demand pseudonym distribution problem. Numerical results indicate our proposed schemes not only improve utility of the clouds, but also maximize utilization of the pseudonyms.