Privacy Protection Mechanisms for Hybrid Hierarchical Wireless Sensor Networks

In the emerging hybrid hierarchical network model for wireless sensor networks, confidential and private data for end users is processed in some distinctive scenarios. In this respect, preserving privacy and establishing trust is a challenging task. This paper presents solutions to privacy issues based on context aware privacy protection and trust establishment mechanisms in hybrid hierarchical architecture. Based on two scenarios where this framework can be applied to - a medical scenario and vehicle network scenario-relevant privacy mechanisms are derived. It is shown, that context aware privacy protection is crucial for networks applying the HHA and hence context aware anonymization and trust establishment algorithms are introduced. An evaluation of the algorithms and analysis of the influence of the complexity of the context attributes are presented.