Impacts of location-privacy preserving schemes on vehicular applications

Location privacy is a big concern in Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs). The strict latency requirements of safety-critical applications demand transmission of unencrypted Cooperative Awareness Messages (CAMs). Also, VANETs nodes and messages must be authenticated to ensure security. Consequently, VANETs are open and leak the identity and location information of users. Therefore, an adversary can easily obtain the information and use it to track a target user. Resulting in performing more severe attacks such as stalking, mugging, burglary, etc. To address the aforementioned issue, many Location Privacy-Preserving Schemes (LPPSs) have been proposed in the recent literature. However, these schemes eventually affect the performance of vehicular applications due to the employed protection mechanisms. Therefore, our survey focuses on researching the impacts of LPPSs on vehicular applications, contrary to most of the existing surveys that focus on detailed comparative analysis of LPPSs. This is the first survey comprehensively debating the effects of LPPSs on vehicular applications to the best of our knowledge. As a result, this survey will help identify techniques that work best for certain applications. In addition, it will help highlight necessary modifications to the LPPSs to preserve the Quality of Services (QoS) of VANETs applications.