Sink-Anonymity Mobility Control in Wireless Sensor Networks

As the technology of mobile sensors advances, mobility control becomes a viable option that can be utilized to minimize energy consumption in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). A mobility control protocol re-deploys mobile sensors to optimal positions to minimize energy consumption for communication. We identify a unique privacy issue in mobility control protocols that discloses the physical location of the sink node to intruders in WSNs. To protect the sink node, we propose a new privacy preserving scheme to secure mobility control protocols against attacks that locate and sabotage the sink node. The privacy preserving scheme obfuscates the sink location with dummy sink nodes. Analysis shows that the scheme can effectively hide the sink location via anonymity. The scheme can also be easily integrated into current mobility control protocols without raising much additional overhead. The performance simulation and analysis show that, with the sink node well-protected, mobility control protocols achieve similar performance as original protocols.