Routing for enhancing source-location privacy in wireless sensor networks of multiple assets

Abstract

In wireless sensor networks, a node that reports information gathered from adjacent assets should relay packets appropriately so that its location context is kept private, and thereby helping ensure the security of the assets that are being monitored. Unfortunately, existing routing methods that counter the local eavesdropping-based tracing deal with a single asset, and most of them suffer from the packet-delivery latency as they prefer to take a separate path of many hops for each packet being sent. In this paper, we propose a routing method, greedy perimeter stateless routing-based source-location privacy with crew size w (GSLP-w), that enhances location privacy of the packet-originating node (i.e., active source) in the presence of multiple assets. GSLP-w is a hybrid method, in which the next-hop node is chosen in one of four modes, namely greedy, random, perimeter, and retreat modes. Random forwarding brings the path diversity, while greedy forwarding refrains from taking an excessively long path and leads to convergence to the destination. Perimeter routing makes detours that avoid the nodes near assets so that they cannot be located by an adversary tracing up the route path. We study the performance of GSLP-w with respect to crew size w (the number of packets being sent per path) and the number of sources. GSLP-w is compared with phantom routing-single path (PR-SP), which is a notable routing method for source-location privacy and our simulation results show that improvements from the point of the ratio of safety period and delivery latency become significant as the number of source nodes increases.