A privacy‐aware overlay routing scheme in WSNs

Abstract

AbstractIn most of the wireless sensor networks (WSNs) configurations, the sensors are statically deployed and configured to propagate the captured information towards a sink‐sensor, a gateway with legacy systems or the internet. The captured information might be unclassified, such as environmental data, or classified as private information, such as the location of an important asset, person, or actuator. In the latter case, privacy enhancement mechanisms might be essential to ensure the confidentiality of the propagated information, as well as the location of the information source (i.e., a sensor). Light cryptographic cyptosystems, such us Elliptic Curve, might be useful to cipher the information that is relayed towards the sink. On the other hand, the static deployment of sensors in WSN simplifies the reveal of the information source. An eavesdropper might use reverse packet‐routing to identify the location of the source sensor, i.e., the one that captured and reported the information. To deal with these issues, and enhance source‐location privacy, information secrecy in WSNs, ensure source‐to‐sink unlinkability, without complex and demanding crypto‐operations, we have introduced a novel approach that uses a non–geographical, overlay routing method for packet forwarding, routing, and delivery. This paper introduces the architecture of the approach, and assesses its performance through simulation experiments, providing comparisons with relative approaches. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.