R-STaR destination-location privacy schemes in wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) can provide the world with a technology for real-time event monitoring for both military and civilian applications. One of the primary concerns that hinder the successful deployment of wireless sensor networks is providing adequate location privacy. Many protocols have been proposed to provide location privacy but most are based on public-key cryptosystems, while others are either energy inefficient or have certain security flaws. In this paper, after analyzing security weakness of the existing schemes, we propose an architecture that addresses the security flaw for destination location privacy in WSNs based on energy-aware two phase routing protocol. We call this scheme the R-STaR routing protocol. In the first routing phase of R-STaR routing, the source node transmits the the message to a randomly selected intermediate node located in a pre-determined region surrounding the source node, which we call the R-STaR area. In the second routing phase, the message is routed to the destination node using shortest path mix with fake message injections. We show that R-STaR routing provides a exceptional balance between security and energy consumption in comparison to existing well-known proposed schemes.