Directional random routing for enhancing source location privacy in wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks are being deployed in different event monitoring applications where the location of a source node might indicate information such as the presence of valuable asset or person, the behavior of an event etc. Thus, strong location privacy preservation technique is always preferred by the sensor system. Although the content is secured with different encryption techniques, open wireless channel allows an adversary to analyze traffic patterns, trace back and locate the source node. To achieve source-location privacy, several techniques based on flooding, random walk and dummy traffic transmission are proposed for WSN. In this paper, we propose a new routing method that randomly forwards a packet towards the sink such that an adversary will find difficult in tracing the source location. We evaluate privacy of our proposed method in terms of success rate of an adversary. The simulation results show proposed routing strategy is better in preserving privacy.