A sector-based random routing scheme for protecting the source location privacy in WSNs for the Internet of Things

Abstract

With the development of the Internet of Things (IoT), Smart Data, which effectively support the IoT for planning, operation, monitoring, control, and intelligent decision making, has received extensive interest by researchers. However, the security of the data source has not been entirely resolved. Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are vital components of the IoT for event monitoring and information gathering. Recently, source location privacy (SLP) protection in WSNs has attracted attentions as an approach to prevent adversaries from performing a backtracking strategy to capture the data sources. In view of the characteristics of the sensor nodes, the restricted computing power and the energy resource, we propose a sector-based random routing (SRR) scheme to address the SLP problem and reduce the energy consumption. In the SRR, the data packets are sent to random phantom sources that are located in different sectors and are distributed in all directions to reach the sink node. In addition, the concept of a hop threshold is presented to control the routing strategies and reduce the energy consumption. The theoretical analysis and experimental results prove that the proposed protocol efficiently reduces backtracking and direction attacks while safekeeping the balance between security and network lifetime.