A source location privacy preservation scheme in WSN-assisted IoT network by randomized ring and confounding transmission

Wireless sensor network (WSN) based applications have become regular in our daily lives, and their integration with the Internet of Things (IoT) makes them even more productive and convenient. However, the inclusion of massive devices, which form the core of IoT, raises plenty of security concerns. Many security strategies to handle data privacy have been proposed in previous work. However, very few of these schemes addressed the confidentiality of the sensor node's position. The goal of this study is to ensure source node location privacy by source location privacy preservation technique by randomized ring routing and confounding transmission (SLP-RRRCT). Random routing with confusing transmission benefits the SLP-RRRCT by distracting the adversary backtracking process. After the random routing phase expires, packets are forwarded to the base station (BS) by neighbour grid-based ring routing. During the development of SLP-RRRCT, we concentrated on the privacy of sensor node position, sensor energy usage, network lifetime, and packet routing randomization. Through a simulation experiment and theoretical analysis, we have observed that the proposed SLP-RRRCT provides better safety time, randomization in transmission delay, and large network lifetime than the compared techniques, i.e., baseline, probabilistic, phantom, source location protection protocol based on dynamic routing (SLPDR), and source location privacy protection scheme based on ring-loop routing (SLPRR).

Automated summary

This study proposes a method to protect the privacy of sensor node location in wireless sensor networks by using randomized routing and confusing transmission. The results of simulation experiments and theoretical analysis show that this method performs better in terms of safety time, randomization in transmission delay, and network lifetime.