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

Abstract

Wireless sensor network (WSN) technology presents significant advantages in the Internet of Things (IoT). WSNs are designed to operate in unattended, harsh, and complex environments. However, WSNs are resource-constrained. Due to the operating environment settings, there exist great challenges in the privacy and reliability of WSN communications. To achieve secure and reliable WSN communications, it is necessary to design reliable routing protocols and provide a method to evaluate the performance of the protocols. To guarantee location privacy of source nodes, numerous source location privacy (SLP) routing protocols have been presented in the literature. However, the SLP reliability of the protocols has not been evaluated. In this article, we achieve three main objectives. First, a new relay ring routing (ReRR) protocol is proposed to address some limitations of two fake packet-based SLP routing protocols. The routing algorithm of ReRR is specifically designed to provide long-term SLP protection. Second, unlike previous articles that focus solely on measuring the magnitude of the SLP protection using performance metrics such as safety period, capture ratio, attack success rate, and capture probability, this article proposes a novel approach to measure the SLP reliability of the protocols. In the third objective, we conduct a series of experiments to analyze the performance of ReRR and the fake packet-based protocols. Using the proposed approach, the SLP reliability of the protocols is evaluated. Experiment results reveal that the proposed ReRR protocol exhibits conducive performance features. It is observed that the fake packet-based routing protocols achieve strong SLP protection by integrating multiple routing techniques such as packet flooding and random distribution of fake packet traffic. However, the achieved SLP protection is short-term and less reliable. On the other hand, the proposed ReRR protocol employs an energy-efficient routing algorithm to guarantee reliability and long-term SLP protection. In addition, it is shown that the ReRR protocol guarantees improved network lifetime.

Silence is Golden: A Source Location Privacy Scheme for Wireless Sensor Networks Based on Silent Nodes

“…A sensor node equipped with a low-powered CPU and limited RAM can sense the surrounding environment such as temperature and pressure. A wireless sensor network (WSN) consists of many such nodes and enables many practical applications ranging from animal behavior and habitat monitoring [1,2], military [3], medical services [4], and other applications [5]. Due to the distributed nature of the WSN, data are often originally produced and sent from a sensor node called source to be received by a sensor node called sink through many intermediate sensor nodes in the network over a wireless broadcast medium and the communication protocol.…”