A privacy-aware location cloaking technique reducing bandwidth consumption in location-based services

The explosive growth of location-detection devices, such as GPS (Global Positioning System), continuously increases users' privacy threat in location-based services (LBSs). However, in order to enjoy such services, the user must precisely disclose his/her exact location to the LBS. So, it is a key challenge to efficiently preserve user's privacy while accessing LBS. For this, the existing method employs a 2PASS cloaking scheme hides the actual user location and reduces bandwidth consumption. However, it suffers from privacy attack since the 2PASS does not actually consider user distribution in the cloaking area.. Therefore, it is required to preserve user privacy by utilizing k-anonymity property. So, we, in this paper, propose a weighted adjacency graph based k-anonymous cloaking technique that can ensure users privacy protection and also reduce bandwidth usages. Our cloaking approach efficiently supports k-nearest neighbor queries without revealing the private information of the query initiator. We demonstrate via experimental results that our algorithm yields much better performance than the existing one.