Abstract
Recently, location based services (LBSs) have become increasingly popular due to advances in mobile devices and their positioning capabilities. In an LBS, the user sends a range of queries regarding his k-nearest neighbors (kNNs) that have common points of interests (POIs) based on his real geographic location. During the query sending, processing, and responding phases, private information may be collected by an attacker, either by tracking the real locations or by analyzing the sent queries. This compromises the privacy of the user and risks his/her safety in certain cases. Thus, the objective of this paper is to ensure comprehensive privacy protection, while also guaranteeing the efficiency of kNN query processing. Therefore, we propose an agent-based system for dealing with these issues. The system is managed by three software agents (selector(DL), fragmentor(Q), and predictor). The selectorDL agent executes a Wise Dummy Selection Location (WDSL) algorithm to ensure the location privacy. The mission of the selectorDL agent is integrated with the mission of the fragmentorQ agent, which is to ensure the query privacy based on Left-Right Fragmentation (LRF) algorithm. To guarantee the efficiency of kNN processing, the predictor agent executes a prediction phase depending on a Cell Based Indexing (CBI) technique. Compared to similar privacy protection approaches, the proposed WDSL and LRF approaches showed higher resistance against location homogeneity attacks and query sampling attacks. In addition, the proposed CBI indexing technique obtains more accurate answers to kNN queries than the previous indexing techniques.