Combining Source-Location Privacy and Routing Efficiency in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have been widely used in various applications for continuous event monitoring and detection. The WSNs communication is generally event-driven. While confidentiality of the message content can be ensured through content encryption, it is much more difficult to adequately protect the source-location information of the event. For WSNs, source-location privacy service is further complicated by the fact that the sensor nodes consist of low-cost and low-power radio devices, computationally intensive cryptographic algorithms (such as public-key cryptosystems) and large scale broadcasting-based protocols are not suitable for WSNs. On the other hand, exposure of the source-location can jeopardize the successful deployment of WSNs. In this paper, we propose a scheme to provide both source-location privacy and routing efficiency through routing to an intermediate node selected from a hierarchical connected dominating set (CDS) of the network. The CDS represents the backbone of the network and the nodes in the CDS are located in different regions of the network. As a result, choosing nodes from the CDS can ensure the intermediate node to be away from the actual message source node. The selection of the intermediate node can effectively prevent the adversary from performing routing trace back attack to identify the message source node. In addition, this design guarantees a high message delivery ratio and a high message delivery efficiency.