A geographic map-based middleware framework to obfuscate smart vehicles’ locations

In the 5G applications, smart vehicles typically use built-in positioning functions to query geographic map information or to access location-based multimedia or service, such as traffic image, 3D graphics or surrounding points of interest (POI) from a location-based service (LBS) provider. However, when a query is submitted, vehicles’ information such as their real locations or moving routes may be collected by the service provider. To protect vehicles’ privacy, we developed a geographic map-based middleware framework to prevent the service providers from predicting vehicles’ location or moving routes by using background information derived from the geographic maps. In addition, the middleware framework uses a caching approach to generate obfuscation areas on the maps to improve performance. The proposed method also considers popular tourist POIs on the maps to enhance the cache data hit ratio and query performance.