On the Use of Distributed Beamforming to Increase Base Station Anonymity in Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

In recent years, Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have become valuable assets to both the commercial and military communities with applications ranging from industrial control on a factory floor to reconnaissance of a hostile border. In most applications, the sensors act as data sources and forward information generated by event triggers to a central sink or base station (BS). The unique role of the BS makes it a natural target for an adversary that desires to achieve the most impactful attack possible against a WSN with the least amount of effort. Even if a WSN employs conventional security mechanisms such as encryption and authentication, an adversary may apply traffic analysis techniques to identify the BS. This motivates a significant need for improved BS anonymity to protect the identity, role, and location of the BS. In this paper we propose a novel cross-layer relay-selection algorithm and a distributed beamforming protocol to increase BS anonymity. We examine the effect of the proposed distributed beamforming technique on improving BS anonymity using evidence theory analysis and demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach through simulation.