A Probabilistic Source Location Privacy Protection Scheme in Wireless Sensor Networks

With the recent developments of wireless sensor networks (WSNs), computing and communication have experienced huge advancement. Meanwhile, security has not received the same attention to go along with such developments. In this paper, we focus on the source location privacy problem in WSNs, a hot research topic in security, and propose a probabilistic source location privacy (PSLP) protection scheme for WSNs. A more powerful adversary, which can use hidden Markov model to estimate the state of the source, is considered in this study. To cope with this type of adversary, phantom nodes and fake sources, which are responsible to mimic the behavior of the source, are utilized to diversify the routing path. Then, the weight of each node is calculated as a criterion to select the next-hop candidate. In addition, two transmission modes are designed to transmit real packets. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed PSLP scheme improves the safety time without compromising the energy consumption.