Location Privacy Protection in Online Query based-on Privacy Region Replacement

In order to realize online location query based on privacy in the location-based service (LBS), a location privacy protection method based on privacy region replacement (PRR) was proposed to improve the query response time without reducing the degree of privacy protection in this paper. Firstly, a privacy region was generated according to the density of people and privacy requirements. Secondly, the privacy region was replaced into an anonymous region based on the personnel distribution in the privacy region. And then the coverage degree between the anonymous region and the user query region is calculated. Finally, a new query region was used to carry on the online query. Comparing with other methods such as Casper, Fragment, and ARC, the query response time was reduced at least 17.33% in PRR with the same degree of privacy protection. The results show that the quantity of services was improved effectively using the PRR in online query.