Enhancing Source Location Privacy in Energy-Constrained Wireless Sensor Networks

Research community has done much work to tackle the privacy preservation problem of wireless sensor networks in recent years. Many privacy-related issues have been addressed by security mechanism; however, location privacy problem has not been addressed effectively. The location privacy problem, which allows an adversary to determine the location of nodes of interest to him, is quite different from content privacy which could be protected by encryption and authentication. In this paper, an enhanced directed random walk (EDROW) technique is proposed. This approach introduces a ring, which makes an adversary to backtrack to the origin of the sensor communication more difficult, to enhance the directed random walk route. The results of simulation demonstrate that the enhanced directed random walk technique is a powerful approach for preserving source location privacy.