Hybrid online protocols for source location privacy in wireless sensor networks

Abstract Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) will form the building blocks of many novel applications such as asset monitoring. These applications will have to guarantee that the location of the occurrence of specific events is kept private from attackers, in what is called the source location privacy (SLP) problem. Fake sources have been used in numerous techniques, however, the solution’s efficiency is typically achieved by fine-tuning parameters at compile time. This is undesirable as WSN conditions may change. In this paper, we first present an SLP algorithm – Dynamic  – that estimates the relevant parameters at runtime and show that it provides a high level of SLP, albeit at the expense of a high number of messages. To address this, we provide a hybrid online algorithm – DynamicSPR  – that uses directed random walks for the fake sources allocation strategy to reduce energy usage. We perform simulations of the various protocols we present and our results show that DynamicSPR provides a similar level of SLP as when parameters are optimised at compile-time, with a lower number of messages sent.