Location Privacy Schemes in Vehicular Networks: Taxonomy, Comparative Analysis, Design Challenges, and Future Opportunities

Vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs) have revolutionized the world with smart traffic management, better utilizing the road environment, and providing safety and convenience to the vehicles’ drivers. Despite the useful features of VANETs, there are some privacy issues, which hinder their way toward achieving smarter and safer traffic in the world. Location privacy is one of the critical research challenges for the efficient deployment of VANETs. This challenge can be solved using a pseudonym instead of an actual vehicle identity in the beacon messages. For this purpose, many location privacy schemes are introduced in the literature. In this paper, we thoroughly review the existing location privacy schemes and present their comprehensive taxonomy. We discuss the design challenges for the development of an efficient location privacy scheme. Moreover, the existing location privacy techniques are critically analyzed based on diverse road network environments and parameters. Various issues and challenges regarding the pseudonym-changing process are elaborated in detail. Finally, we discuss the future trends for the implementation of location privacy in a vehicular network.