A Protocol for Sink Location Privacy Protection in Wireless Sensor Networks

Due to the broadcasting nature of wireless sensor networks, it is relatively easy for an adversary to discover the sinks´ location through traffic volume analysis. Traditional encryption and authentication methods are not effective to preserve privacy of a sink´s location from a global adversary, capably of monitoring the traffic activity of the network. In this paper, we propose the Sink Location Privacy Protection Protocol (SLPP), which in addition to been effective in achieving its design objective it is also easy to implement. In order to confuse a local or global adversary, each node generates fake messages, the number of which is dependent on the number of the node´s children. Simulation results demonstrate clearly that the SLPP protocol can hide effectively the sink´s location. However, what is important and interesting is that although transmission of fake messages consumes additional energy from nodes, the network´s lifetime is not impacted.