Using fake sinks and deceptive relays to boost base-station anonymity in Wireless Sensor Network

In applications of wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), the base-station (BS) acts as a sink for all data traffic. The continuous flow of packets toward the BS enables the adversary to analyze the traffic and uncover the BS position. In this paper we present a technique to counter such an attack by morphing the traffic pattern in the WSN. Our approach introduces multiple fake sinks and deceptive relays so that nodes other than the BS are implicated as the destination of all data traffic. Since the problem of the optimal fake sink´s placement is NP-hard, we employ a heuristic to determine the most suitable fake sink count and placement for a network. Dynamic load-balancing trees are formed to identify relay nodes and adapt the topology to route packets to the faked (and real) sinks while extending the network lifetime. The simulation results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed technique.