The vehicular cloud is a promising new paradigm where vehicular networking and mobile cloud computing are elaborately integrated to enhance the quality of vehicular information services. Pseudonym is a resource for vehicles to protect their location privacy, which should be efficiently utilized to secure vehicular clouds. However, only a few existing architectures of pseudonym systems take flexibility and efficiency into consideration, thus leading to potential threats to location privacy. In this paper, we exploit software-defined networking technology to significantly extend the flexibility and programmability for pseudonym management in vehicular clouds. We propose a software-defined pseudonym system where the distributed pseudonym pools are promptly scheduled and elastically managed in a hierarchical manner. In order to decrease the system overhead due to the cost of inter-pool communications, we leverage the two-sided matching theory to formulate and solve the pseudonym resource scheduling.We conducted extensive simulations based on the real map of San Francisco. Numerical results indicate that the proposed software-defined pseudonym system significantly improves the pseudonym resource utilization, and meanwhile, effectively enhances the vehicles’ location privacy by raising their entropy.
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