Low-Latency Spatial-Provenance Recovery Methods for Privacy-Constrained Vehicular Networks

In multihop Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) networks, Road Side Units (RSUs) intend to collect information on vehicles' location in a low-latency manner while respecting their privacy constraints to support real-time location-based services. To facilitate data collection, provenance is known to ensure trust and accountability of data. Although existing joint data- and spatial-provenance techniques preserve the privacy of vehicles up to a certain granularity with respect to the RSU and other vehicles, they are unsuitable when stringent deadlines are imposed on the end-to-end delay on the packets. As a consequence, there is a need for designing spatial-provenance methods for V2X networks that satisfy stringent deadlines on the end-to-end delays while managing the privacy concerns. To fill this research gap, we propose two novel protocols, namely: Bi-Segment Embedding (BSE) and Tri-Segment Embedding (TSE), which provide a skipping mechanism for joint data- and spatial-provenance while trading off privacy features among the vehicles. Through an extensive theoretical framework, we provide an analysis of the proposed schemes in terms of reliability, privacy, and communication overhead. When compared to the baselines, our protocols offer lower end-to-end delay, higher reliability in provenance reconstruction, and the same level of privacy with respect to the RSU. We validate latency gains using practical radio parameters, and our study reveals that our proposed protocols offer significant benefits in latency when implemented over a 5G stack.