A source location protection protocol based on dynamic routing in WSNs for the Social Internet of Things

Abstract

With the development of the Internet of Things (IoT), a more humanity-related network called the Social Internet of Things (SIoT) is now evolving. WSNs are also part of the Social Internet of Things (SIoT), a new application of the Internet of Things (IoT). Considering the characteristics of sensor nodes, including limited resource, limited communication capability, and an uncontrollable environment, location privacy protection is a challenging problem for WSNs. In this paper, we propose a source location protection protocol based on dynamic routing to address the source location privacy problem. We introduce a dynamic routing scheme that aims at maximizing paths for data transmission. The proposed scheme first randomly chooses an initial node from the boundary of the network. Every package will travel a greedy route and a subsequent directed route before reaching the sink. Theoretical and experimental results show that our scheme can preserve source location privacy and defeat various privacy disclosure attacks (eavesdropping attack, hop-by-hop trace back attack, and direction-oriented attack) without affecting the network lifetime.