FMSLPP: fake-message based sink location privacy preservation for WSNs against global eavesdroppers

摘要

Traditional encryption and authentication methods are not effective in preserving sink's location privacy from a global adversary that could be monitoring the network's traffic and time-of-arrival of traffic flows. In this paper, we present a novel method named fake-message based sink location privacy preservation (FMSLPP) to protect sink's location privacy against global eavesdroppers. In this method, we let sensors generate fake messages with a probability before the sink sends a message, in order to confuse an adversary about the sink's location. We also make each node have approximately the same traffic volume to protect the sink's location privacy. Simulation results from two approaches of sensor deployment (random deployment or controlled deployment) indicate that FMSLPP makes it very difficult for the global adversary to identify the location of the sink; at the same time, transmission of fake messages does not impact significantly the network's performance in terms of network life.