Virtual trip lines for distributed privacy-preserving traffic monitoring

Automotive traffic monitoring using probe vehicles with Global Positioning System receivers promises significant improvements in cost, coverage, and accuracy. Current approaches, however, raise privacy concerns because they require participants to reveal their positions to an external traffic monitoring server. To address this challenge, we propose a system based on virtual trip lines and an associated cloaking technique. Virtual trip lines are geographic markers that indicate where vehicles should provide location updates. These markers can be placed to avoid particularly privacy sensitive locations. They also allow aggregating and cloaking several location updates based on trip line identifiers, without knowing the actual geographic locations of these trip lines. Thus they facilitate the design of a distributed architecture, where no single entity has a complete knowledge of probe identities and fine-grained location information. We have implemented the system with GPS smartphone cl...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: MOBISYS
• Authors: Baik Hoh, Marco Gruteser, Ryan Herring, Jeff Ban, Daniel B. Work, Juan Carlos Herrera, Alexandre M. Bayen, Murali Annavaram, Quinn Jacobson
• Keywords: Associated Cloaking Technique, MOBISYS 2008, Probe Vehicles, Virtual Trip Lines, Wireless Networks