Comprehensive Performance Analysis of Privacy Protection Protocols Utilizing Fake Packet Injection Techniques

Abstract

In many Internet of Things (IoT) systems and monitoring wireless sensor networks (WSNs), sensor nodes are expected to function for prolonged periods of time with no scope of recharging the sensor node batteries. Similarly, in safety-critical monitoring applications, the WSNs are expected to guarantee effective source location privacy (SLP) protection throughout the network lifetime. Fake packet-based SLP protocols are often energy-inefficient, they incur short network lifetime, and have high probability of packet collision events. Therefore, it is important to evaluate features such as the capability of the protocols to guarantee effective SLP protection for prolonged periods of time and reliable packet delivery. The existing studies show some deficit in the performance evaluation of the protocols. Consequently, this paper presents some investigations on the performance of the fake packet-based SLP protocols. Comprehensive performance analysis of four existing protocols is done under varied network parameters and configurations. Performance is observed under varied sensor node residual energy, source-sink distance, lifetime, source packet rate, network size, and node density. Analysis results establish that the protocols are capable of achieving high levels of SLP protection. However, the privacy protection is short-lived. Furthermore, the results show that long source-sink distance, long fake packet routes, short distance between fake packet sources and phantom nodes, and large amounts of fake packet traffic can improve the SLP protection while diminishing the packet delivery reliability, energy efficiency, and the network lifetime. The results also show that when the source packet rate is increased it influences some negative effects on the performance of the protocols. Moreover, it is observed that integrating fake packet routing and packet flooding techniques can impact some positive effects on the SLP protection and negative effects on the network lifetime. Based on the observations and analysis results, some recommendations are presented to improve the performance of the protocols. INDEX TERMS Source location privacy protection, wireless sensor network, routing protocol, fake packet routing, packet delivery reliability. LILIAN C. MUTALEMWA received the B.Eng. degree in telecommunications engineering from the

Novel Approaches to Realize the Reliability of Location Privacy Protocols in Monitoring Wireless Networks

“…This study is motivated by the discussions in [2], [4], [19], [21]- [23], [30]. In [30], it was shown that the DissR and DistrR protocols achieve short-term SLP protection and reduced network lifetime due to high energy consumption. Furthermore, it was shown that DissR incurs unbalanced energy distribution.…”

“…Numerous SLP protocols have been proposed. Many of the protocols were discussed in [11], [12], [16], [30]- [36], [42]. Some of the recently proposed SLP protocols include the two-level phantom with a pursue ring protocol [12], unified single and multi-path routing protocol [13], dynamic multipath routing protocol [17], grid-based single phantom node protocol [34], data dissemination protocol [37], and the protocol based on anonymity cloud [43].…”

“…SLP is a significant challenge in monitoring WSNs mainly because if a source location is easily exposed to the adversary, the security performance of the WSN can be seriously compromised [12], [14], [15]. To address the challenge of SLP, numerous SLP routing protocols have been proposed in the literature [11], [12], [16], [30]- [36]. In this study, we propose the relay ring routing (ReRR) protocol.…”

“…Exhaustive energy consumption of sensor nodes and unbalanced energy distribution can seriously affect the operation of WSNs, resulting in limitations such as limited network lifetime [1]- [5], [39]- [41] and short-term SLP protection [30]. Therefore, to outperform the DissR and DistrR protocols, ReRR regulates the energy consumption of the sensor nodes by reducing the amount of packet traffic in the network.…”

A Ring-Based Routing Scheme for Distributed Energy Resources Management in IIoT

“…In RPFs, each node must acquire and store less network topology information to ensure that the network is operating, which reduces the storage space for sensor nodes and further strengthens the security of WSNs. In PRFs, data packets transmitted in the network are primarily divided into two categories: real and fake packets [13]. The real packets contain data collected by the source node, while the fake packets are used to imitate the behavior of real packets to confuse attackers.…”