Location Privacy Protection Using Independent ID Update for WLANs

A desirable location privacy protection scheme is important for securing node communication in a wireless local area network (WLAN). By pausing transmission or updating nodes independently, such a scheme can prevent nodes from being tracked or communication information from being snapped. This paper first introduces an ID Tracking Approach to show that nodes which swap IDs with other nodes in existing location privacy protection schemes are actually easy to track. To improve the situation, we then propose a new user-centric scheme – the Shuffle scheme – which is based mainly on local synchronization and independent ID update. Experimental evaluation shows that the special design of node ID shuffling enables the proposed Shuffle scheme to yield better location privacy than schemes which swap node IDs.