Protecting the sink location privacy in wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are widely deployed to collect data in military and civilian applications today. Due to the open nature of a WSN, it is relatively easy for an adversary to eavesdrop and trace packets in order to capture the receiver. Therefore, location privacy, particularly the location privacy of the sink node, requires ultimate protection because of its critical position in WSNs. In this paper, we propose a sink location privacy protection scheme by injecting fake packets, but every real packet is still routed along its shortest path. The fake packets are routed to some random destinations and some fake sinks in order to provide the path diversity. It is difficult for an attacker to distinguish the real packets from the fake packets. Thus, the chance of finding the real sink by packet-tracing attack is reduced. Privacy analysis shows that the sink location privacy can be protected better with higher successful probability. We examine the packet travel delay, safe time, and energy consumption by both mathematical analysis and simulations.