Enhancing source location protection in wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks are widely deployed in the internet of things to monitor valuable objects. Once the object is monitored, the sensor nearest to the object which is known as the source informs the base station about the object’s information periodically. It is obvious that attackers can capture the object successfully by localizing the source. Thus, many protocols have been proposed to secure the source location. However, in this paper, we examine that typical source location protection protocols generate not only near but also highly localized phantom locations. As a result, attackers can trace the source easily from these phantom locations. To address these limitations, we propose a protocol to enhance the source location protection (SLE). With phantom locations far away from the source and widely distributed, SLE improves source location anonymity significantly. Theory analysis and simulation results show that our SLE provides strong source location privacy preservation and the average safety period increases by nearly one order of magnitude compared with existing work with low communication cost.