MixMesh Zones – Changing Pseudonyms Using Device-to-Device Communication in Mix Zones

Mobile device tracking has become ever so pervasive in our world of location-based services and prying eyes. While users can somewhat restrict the flow of information towards the services they consciously use, this is not as easily possible for the mobile network they are connected to. Here, they can be tracked with relative ease by whoever controls the access points they connect to, or even by anyone that is able to monitor the air interface. Trends towards smaller cells and dynamic access point ownership within the scope of 5G only exacerbate this issue. In this paper, we present a new mix zone approach, called MixMesh, based on device-to-device communication, intended to hinder mobile network tracking through enabling secure and privacy-friendly pseudonym changes, aligned with the requirements resulting from the aforementioned trends. Our evaluation shows that our MixMesh approach is able to deliver better anonymity at an unchanged level of service quality compared to existing mix zone techniques, all the while being configurable to a desired level of anonymity in order to adapt to different scenarios