Providing location anonymity in a multi-base station wireless sensor network

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) often operate in inhospitable environments to serve mission-critical and security-sensitive applications that involve hostile adversaries. These adversaries are eager to disrupt the WSN operation. Given the important role that the base-station (BS) plays in a WSN, the adversary opts to identify the BS and determine its location in order to damage the BS or launch a targeted denial of service attack. Therefore, maintaining the BS anonymity is of utmost importance in WSNs. Even if the adversary cannot decode packets, correlating the intercepted transmission through traffic analysis can reveal the position of the BS. This paper considers setups in which the network has multiple base-stations and proposes a novel approach in which these base-stations collaborate on confusing the adversary and averting attacks. The proposed Multi-player Anonymity optimization Game theoretic (MAG) approach calls for the introduction of inter-BS deceptive traffic and use game theory to determine the volume and destination of such traffic so that the variance in the location anonymity over all BSs is reduced. The simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of MAG.