Title: FPODG: a flexible and private proximity testing based on 'one degree' grid

Authors: Tao Jing; Ping Lin; Yanfei Lu; Chunqiang Hu; Yan Huo

Addresses: School of Electronics and Information Engineering, Beijing Jiaotong University, Beijing 100044, China ' School of Electronics and Information Engineering, Beijing Jiaotong University, Beijing 100044, China ' School of Electronics and Information Engineering, Beijing Jiaotong University, Beijing 100044, China ' Department of Computer Science, The George Washington University, Washington 98195, USA ' School of Electronics and Information Engineering, Beijing Jiaotong University, Beijing 100044, China

Abstract: In the location-based services (LBSs), private proximity testing is an important service that not only notifies a user when her friends are nearby but preserves all users' exact locations. However, existing schemes cannot protect the location privacy and guarantee the testing efficiency simultaneously. In this paper, we utilize a novel 'one degree' grid system to solve this challenge, which reduces the testing zone and is convenient for users to establish similar grids without leaking their location information. In addition, a flexible and private proximity testing (FPODG) protocol is proposed based on the 'one degree' grid. FPODG includes two sub-protocols: the pre-filtration subprotocol is used to rule out the case that friends' detected regions are greater than vicinity regions, and the private query sub-protocol aims to further detect friends' proximity. Experimental results show that the proposed protocol exhibits an excellent performance on computation and communication costs.

Keywords: LBS; location-based services; proximity testing; location privacy.

DOI: 10.1504/IJSNET.2016.075371

International Journal of Sensor Networks, 2016 Vol.20 No.3, pp.199 - 207

Received: 20 Aug 2015
Accepted: 24 Aug 2015

Published online: 17 Mar 2016 *

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