Effect of mobility and count of base-stations on the anonymity of Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) can be deployed to serve mission-critical applications in hostile environments such as battlefield and territorial borders. In these setups, the WSN may be subject to attacks in order to disrupt the network operation. The most effective way for an adversary to do so is by targeting the Base-Station (BS), where the sensor data are collected in the field. By identifying and locating the BS, the adversary can launch attacks to damage or disrupt the operation of the BS. Therefore, maintaining the BS anonymity is of utmost importance in WSNs. While a number of techniques have been proposed in the literature to boost BS´s anonymity, no study has exploited the impact of the number of deployed BS and the BS mobility to boost anonymity. This paper fills this gap. We first compare the BS anonymity of one stationary BS to multiple stationary BS under different network topologies. Our results show that having more base-stations can boost both the average and max anonymity of BS nodes. Then we allow some of the base-stations to be mobile, and can move to the lowest anonymity region. Our results show that having one mobile BS can help further increasing the anonymity of the BS; however it is not the case when having more than one BS.