Mixing Ring-Based Source-Location Privacy in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks consist of low-cost and low- power radio devices and are deployed in open and unprotected areas. Privacy is becoming one of the major issues that jeopardize the successful deployment of wireless sensor networks. While confidentiality of the message can be ensured through content encryption, it is much more difficult to adequately address the source-location privacy. For wireless sensor networks, computationally intensive cryptographic algorithms (such as public-key cryptosystems) and large scale broadcasting-based protocols are not suitable. In this paper, we propose a scheme to provide source-location privacy through a three-phase routing: routing to a randomly selected intermediate node, routing in a network mix ring, and message forwarding to the SINK node. While being able to provide source-location privacy for WSN, our simulation results also demonstrate that the proposed scheme is very efficient and can be used for practical applications.