Achieving Location Privacy through the Impact of Changing Pseudonyms

In mobile networks, authentication is a required primitive for most security protocols. Unfortunately, a competitor can monitor pseudonyms used for authentication to track the location of mobile nodes. A regularly proposed solution to protect location privacy suggests that mobile nodes collectively change their pseudonyms in regions called mix zones. This approach is very expensive. Self-interested mobile nodes might thus decide not to cooperate and jeopardize the achievable location privacy. In this paper, we examine non-cooperative behaviour of mobile nodes, where each node aims at increasing its location privacy at a least cost. As in practice mobile nodes do not know their rivals payoffs, we then consider static incomplete information. By means of numerical outcomes, we then predict the behaviour of selsh mobile nodes.