Increasing Transmission Power for Higher Base-Station Anonymity in Wireless Sensor Network

In a wireless sensor network nodes probe ambient conditions and send the measurements over multi-hop routes to a base-station. The base-station aggregates the received reports, and based on the findings it orchestrates a response either autonomously or through consultation with a remote commend center. Thus, the role of the base-station is so crucial that the network can be non-functional and/or isolated if the base-station breaks down or gets destroyed. No wonder in a hostile environment, an adversary will target the base-station to inflict the most damage to the network. The fact that the base-station acts as a sink of all data traffic makes it vulnerable to attacks by tracking packet transmission and detecting its location. This paper investigates a novel strategy to counter traffic analysis and boosts the anonymity of the base-station. A sensor transmits at a higher power in order to increase its number of neighbors and confuse an adversary who is assessing the linkability of nodes in quest to identify the route to the base-station. Both analytical and simulation results are provided to capture the effect of increased transmission power on the base-station anonymity.