Cluster Based Anonymization for Source Location Privacy in Wireless Sensor Network

In many real life applications, the locations of events monitored by the network are required to remain anonymous. Preserving source location privacy becomes important, and also difficult to implement in case of wireless sensor networks (WSN) given their operating constraints. The privacy threats that exist for sensor networks may be categorized broadly into content privacy and context privacy. Context based privacy protection in WSN aims to hide the location information of the sensor nodes. This paper proposes a source location privacy scheme for WSN through cluster based anonymization. The scheme hides the real node identities during communication, by replacing them with random identities generated by the cluster heads. The degree of privacy of WSN is analyzed using entropy based method. The simulation results show that the scheme improves the degree of privacy compared to a method which does not have any provision of anonymity for sensor nodes.