Providing destination-location privacy in wireless sensor network using bubble routing

Abstract

One of the most challenging problems for wireless sensor networks (WSNs) is in how to provide adequate location privacy. In this paper, we will address the concern to adequately provide routing-based destination-location privacy (DLP). The privacy of the location of the destination sensor node is critical and highly vulnerable by the usage of wireless communications. While message content privacy can be accomplished through message encryption, it is much more difficult to adequately address the location privacy. For WSNs, destination-location privacy service is further complex by the fact that sensors consist of low-cost and energy efficient radio devices. Therefore, using computationally intensive cryptographic algorithms (such as public-key cryptosystems) and large scale broadcasting-based protocols are not suitable for WSNs. We propose a unique routing technique that can provide strong destination-location privacy with low tradeoff in the energy overhead. In our proposed scheme, the source node randomly selects an intermediate node from pre-determined region located around the destination node, which we refer to as the bubble region. The bubble region would be large enough to make it infeasible for an adversary to monitor the entire area. Also, in this scheme, we will mix real messages with fake messages to add to the security strength in providing destination-location privacy. We compare our proposed scheme to other well known schemes. © 2012 Springer Science+Business.