An anonymous communication model for privacy-enhanced location based service using an echo agent

A ubiquitous computing environment provides comfortable conditions for anyone to access diverse networks without being concerned about time, place, or device. The Location-Based Service (LBS), for example, provides various convenient services using an individual's location information. However, on the flip side of this convenience, if a user's location information is exposed, it can lead to serious privacy problems. This paper proposes an anonymous communication model that uses an echo agent for LBS to guarantee privacy. Located between the user and the service provider, the echo agent sends both the real user's route and dummy routes to prevent user location information from being grasped and traced by service providers. It maintains an effective data schema to collect, store, and use the users' past routes and dummy routes through the heuristic algorithm. Finally, it develops and applies the policies to manage them. Unlike existing methods, this model provides powerful anonymity because it generates dummy routes which are similar to the real routes of users. In addition, in terms of the simulation result for dummy generation, the proposed model reduces the probability of the wrong node generation to a tenth of the existing model's one. Thus, privacy of user location information can be protected via this method.