Enhancing Location Privacy in Wireless Local Area Networks

Abstract

A desirable location privacy protection scheme is important for secure node communication in a wireless local area network (WLAN). By pausing transmission or updating nodes independently, a location privacy protection scheme can avoid deliberate adversary attack to prevent nodes from being tracked and transmitting information from being snapped. This paper first introduces an ID Tracking approach to show that nodes which swap IDs with other nodes in some existing location privacy protection schemes are actually easy to track. To improve the situation, i.e., to achieve better location privacy, we then propose a new (user-centric) location privacy protection scheme based mainly on local synchronization and independent ID update. With its special design of node ID switching, the new scheme is shown through experimental evaluation to give more enhanced location privacy than schemes which swap node IDs.