Strategic location-based random routing for source location privacy in wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are deployed in sensitive applications, such as in military and asset monitoring. In these applications, it is important to ensure good source location privacy. This is owing to the open nature of WSNs and the easiness of an adversary to eavesdrop on sensor communication and back trace the location of the source node. This paper proposes a scheme to preserve the source location privacy based on random routing techniques. To achieve high privacy, packets are randomly routed from the source to the sink node through strategically positioned mediate or diversion nodes. The random selection of mediate or diversion nodes is location-based. Depending on the location of the source node, packets are forwarded through different regions of the network. The proposed scheme guarantees that successive packets are routed through very different routing paths and adversaries find it confusing to back trace them to the source node location. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme effectively confuses the adversary and provides higher source location privacy to outperform other routing-based source location privacy schemes.