An Enhanced Source Location Privacy based on Data Dissemination in Wireless Sensor Networks (DeLP)

• Main Authors: Naveed Jan, Ali H. Al-Bayatti, Naseer Alalwan, Ahmed Ibrahim Alzahrani
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2019-05-01
• Series: Sensors
• Subjects: wireless sensor network; contextual privacy; source location privacy
• Online Access: https://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/19/9/2050

Wireless Sensor Network is a network of large number of nodes with limited power and computational capabilities. It has the potential of event monitoring in unattended locations where there is a chance of unauthorized access. The work that is presented here identifies and addresses the problem of eavesdropping in the exposed environment of the sensor network, which makes it easy for the adversary to trace the packets to find the originator source node, hence compromising the contextual privacy. Our scheme provides an enhanced three-level security system for source location privacy. The base station is at the center of square grid of four quadrants and it is surrounded by a ring of flooding nodes, which act as a first step in confusing the adversary. The fake node is deployed in the opposite quadrant of actual source and start reporting base station. The selection of phantom node using our algorithm in another quadrant provides the third level of confusion. The results show that Dissemination in Wireless Sensor Networks (DeLP) has reduced the energy utilization by 50% percent, increased the safety period by 26%, while providing a six times more packet delivery ratio along with a further 15% decrease in the packet delivery delay as compared to the tree-based scheme. It also provides 334% more safety period than the phantom routing, while it lags behind in other parameters due to the simplicity of phantom scheme. This work illustrates the privacy protection of the source node and the designed procedure may be useful in designing more robust algorithms for location privacy.