A Collaboration-Based Scheme for Location-Based Services with Incentive Mechanism

摘要

With the proliferation of communica-tion networks and mobile devices, Location-based services (LBSs) have brought a variety of applications and conve-niences in our daily life. While LBSs greatly benefit users, they bring significant threats to users' privacy. To enhance privacy protection for LBSs, a well-used technique is to establish a collaborative group which helps each other to avoid privacy leakage. Due to extremely unbalanced sys-tem overheads for group members, many users are short of intrinsic motivations to join the collaborative group in existing schemes. To address this problem, we propose a collaborative group system combined with dummy selec-tion technique, termed CGS-DS, which not only limits mobile users consuming significant resources in collabo-rative group through the hop distance, but also inspires them to generate and cache the service data of dummies for other group members. Our CGS-DS uses a threshold assignment module to generate a suitable threshold of the hop distance. While the hop distance reaches the specified threshold, the user executes the dummy-cache module to generate some dummy queries and cache the service data for other members to use. Security analysis and evaluation results indicate its eff ectiveness and efficiency.