A Physical Layer metric for measuring base station anonymity in Wireless Sensor Networks

In recent years, Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have become valuable assets to both the commercial and military communities with applications ranging from industrial automation on a factory floor to reconnaissance of a hostile border. In both examples, the sensors act as data sources and relay information to a central sink or base station (BS). Consider the possible attacks that an adversary could launch against a WSN once the BS is identified. This motivates a significant need for improved network security to protect against such malicious attacks. One such mitigation strategy is to increase the anonymity of the BS such that the adversary is unable to distinguish it from the other nodes of the sensor field. Many techniques have been proposed in the literature to improve BS anonymity by altering network-layer routing algorithms; however, few techniques have been proposed to improve anonymity at the Physical Layer (PHY). This is, in part, due to the lack of metrics to characterize PHY anonymity. In this paper, we propose an algorithm called “Intercept, Correlate, and Follow” (ICF) to characterize PHY anonymity in a WSN network. Simulation results based on the IEEE 802.15.4a Ultra Wideband (UWB) PHY illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed ICF algorithm.