Source location privacy in a cluster-based wireless sensor networks against local adversary

Abstract

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have been popular nowadays as they provide low-cost solutions of a wide-range of real life challenges. WSN consists of a group of infrastructure-less wireless nodes that works together to deliver physical or environmental monitored data from source to sink. In general, WSNs are vulnerable to wireless attacks due to the open nature of the wireless networks. Also, WSNs suffer from unbalanced energy consumption which reduces the network life time due to the creation of the energy-hole. Two types of threats may occur for the WSNs privacy, which are; contextual and content privacy; location privacy is considered as an example for contextual privacy, where an eavesdropper tries to find the location of the source or sink. Hence, ensuring the security and privacy in WSNs is considered as an essential issue. In this paper, we avoid energy-hole creation and protect source location privacy (SLP) via proposing two source privacy protection schemes based on clustering, which are dynamic shortest path scheme (DSP) and Dynamic tree scheme (DT). We adopted grid-based clustering technique to divide the network to several square clusters. Matlab simulation evaluates the performance of the two proposed schemes in terms of safety period.