Location privacy protection through anonymous cells in road network

To solve the problem of location privacy protection under restricted context in road network, this work developed and demonstrated a privacy protection algorithm. According to the characteristics of points and lines structure in the road network, the network is divided into anonymous cells with each road intersection as the center in advance. Cells are coded with Hilbert curve and indexed by a B+ tree. Two cellular-based methods for query anonymous processing nearest neighbor first and nearest road first were introduced. Then the two methods were analyzed and compared. Data from a real city map simulation show the effectiveness of the algorithm. The results prove that the nearest road first cloaking method can achieve more location privacy without loss of efficiency than the other, therefore improve the robustness against inference attacks.