Improving source-location privacy through opportunistic routing in wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSN) can be an attractive solution for a plethora of communication applications, such as unattended event monitoring and tracking. One of the looming challenges that threaten the successful deployment of these sensor networks is source-location privacy, especially when a network is deployed to monitor sensitive objects. In order to enhance source location privacy in sensor networks, we propose the use of an opportunistic mesh networking scheme and examine four different approaches. Each approach has different selection criteria for the next relay node. In opportunistic mesh networks, each sensor transmits the packet over a dynamic path to the destination. Every packet from the source can therefore follow a different path toward the destination, making it difficult for an adversary to backtrack hop-by-hop to the origin of the sensor communication.