  To support location-based services, vehicles must share their location with a
server to receive relevant data, compromising their (location) privacy. To
alleviate this privacy compromise, the vehicle's location can be obfuscated by
adding artificial noise. Under limited available bandwidth, and since the area
including the vehicle's location increases with the noise, the server will
provide fewer data relevant to the vehicle's true location, reducing the
effectiveness of a location-based service. To alleviate this problem, we
propose that data relevant to a vehicle is also provided through direct, ad hoc
communication by neighboring vehicles. Through such Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V)
cooperation, the impact of location obfuscation is mitigated. Since vehicles
subscribe to data of (location-dependent) impact values, neighboring vehicles
will subscribe to largely overlapping sets of data, reducing the benefit of V2V
cooperation. To increase such benefit, we develop and study a non-cooperative
game determining the data that a vehicle should subscribe to, aiming at
maximizing its utilization while considering the participating (neighboring)
vehicles. Our analysis and results show that the proposed V2V cooperation and
derived strategy lead to significant performance increase compared to
non-cooperative approaches and largely alleviates the impact of privacy on
location-based services.
