A survey on location privacy protection in Wireless Sensor Networks

Location of sensor nodes is one of the most important and fundamental information for Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), because it provides basic support for many location-based applications (e.g., navigation and object tracking) and location-aware protocols (e.g., geographic location-based routing protocols). However, by extracting and analyzing the location information in packets, attackers can easily obtain the real position of source nodes or base station using hop-by-hop backtracking strategy, which is extremely harmful for the normal operation of sensor networks. So, we need to provide location anonymity for sensor networks. In this paper, we present a detail survey of existing Location Privacy Protection (LPP) techniques in WSNs. First, the network model, the attack model and the performance evaluation model are reviewed. Then, this survey provides a review of the literature about location privacy protection, which is classified into the following three categories: 1) source nodes' location privacy preserving, 2) sink nodes' location privacy preserving, and 3) location privacy preserving for both source and sink nodes. The details of location privacy preserving protocols are carefully analyzed, and the key mechanisms in each protocol are elaborated. In addition, the performance, including the network safety period, the packet transmission latency and the energy consumption, is analyzed and compared. Finally, the exiting problems and the future research issues are presented.