Position-Independent and Section-Based Source Location Privacy Protection in WSN

Privacy of critical locations (or events) is essential when monitored by wireless sensor networks. To mitigate such issues, in this article, a new privacy protection technique named position-independent and section-based source location privacy (PSSLP) is developed. A biased random walk and greedy walk using a three- or four-phase routing strategy is employed here, where the number of phases depends on the network segment in which the source is situated. The biased random walk is intended to send packets away from the source of information and make routing paths appear dynamic to the eavesdropper, whereas, the greedy routing ensures that the packets converge at the base station. The objective of the solution is to achieve a uniform amount of privacy irrespective of the position of the asset in the network without compromising the network lifetime. Performance evaluation is done using developed analytical models and simulation results reveal that PSSLP achieves 8247.06- and 33.0- folds improvement in terms safety period and network lifetime, respectively, compared to no SLP protection technique (i.e., shortest path routing technique).

Automated summary

In this article, a new privacy protection technique called PSSLP, which achieves position-independent and section-based source location privacy, is proposed. The technique utilizes biased random walk and greedy walk routing strategies to make routing paths dynamic and ensure convergence at the base station. Experimental results show that PSSLP achieves significant improvements in terms of safety period and network lifetime compared to the shortest path routing technique.