Concealing of the Sink Location in WSNs by artificially homogenizing traffic intensity

For sensor networks deployed to collect and transmit events into a sink node, sink anonymity is a critical security property. Traditional encryption and authentication are not effective in terms of preserving the sink´s location because attackers can determine its location through traffic analysis. In this paper, we propose an easy to implement Concealing of the Sink Location (CSL) technique, which is based on the use of fake message injection. CSL is able to prevent attackers from acquiring valuable information on the sink´s location through the traffic analysis attack. Simulation results demonstrate clearly that CSL protocol can hide effectively the sink´s location. Although using fake messages consumes additional energy, the network´s lifetime is not impacted, as will be shown.