A Differentially Private Hybrid Approach to Traffic Monitoring

In recent years, privacy research has been gaining ground in vehicular communication technologies. Collecting data from connected vehicles presents a range of opportunities for industry and government to perform data analytics. Although many researchers have explored some privacy solutions for vehicular communications, the conditions to deploy them are still maturing, especially when it comes to privacy for sensitive data aggregation analysis. In this work, we propose a hybrid solution combining the original differential privacy framework with an instance-based additive noise technique. The results show that for typical instances we obtain a significant reduction in outliers. As far as we know, our paper is the first detailed experimental evaluation of differentially private techniques applied to traffic monitoring. The validation of the proposed solution was performed through extensive simulations in typical traffic scenarios using real data.