Dynamic routing approach for enhancing source location privacy in wireless sensor networks

In real-time and mission-critical applications of wireless sensor networks (WSNs), such as military, the location of monitored objects must only be informed by sensor nodes to the base station, remaining anonymous to the rest of the network. However, preserving source location privacy is a challenging task due to the open nature of WSNs. Several methods have been proposed to address this issue, including anonymity-based, obfuscation-based, and policy-based methods. Anonymity-based methods are unsuitable for protecting position privacy, obfuscation-based methods are unable to protect identity, and policy-based methods are appropriate for all location privacy categories but challenging for end-users to understand and manage. These methods take into account different assumptions about attackers, energy consumption, and other factors in WSNs such as transmission delay and fixed battery and memory. Prior research has focused on one or more aspects of WSNs while ignoring others. In this work, we propose a Dynamic Routing Approach For enhancing Source Location Privacy in WSNs (SLP-DRA) to preserve source location privacy by dynamically selecting a path and injecting fake messages into the network. The dynamic selection of a route for transmitting real messages from the source sensor node to the base station, in the presence of fake packets, successfully confuses the attacker about the exact location of the monitored object in the network. The simulated results are compared using commonly used performance metrics of WSNs such as energy usage, transmission delay, security, and network lifetime. The comparative results show that SLP-DRA enhances the security level in preserving source location privacy compared to other techniques without compromising network lifetime, transmission delay, or energy consumption. We validate that SLP-DRA is robust against commonly used attacks, such as hop-by-hop and backtracking attacks, in finding the source location in WSNs.