Multiple k-hop clusters based routing scheme to preserve source-location privacy in WSNs

REN Ju(任炬), ZHANG Yao-xue(张尧学), LIU Kang(刘康)

(School of Information Science and Engineering, Central South University, Changsha 410083, China)

Abstract:Privacy is becoming one of the most notable challenges threatening wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Adversaries may use RF (radio frequency) localization techniques to perform hop-by-hop trace back to the source sensor’s location. A multiple k-hop clusters based routing strategy (MHCR) is proposed to preserve source-location privacy as well as enhance energy efficiency for WSNs. Owing to the inherent characteristics of intra-cluster data aggregation, each sensor of the interference clusters is able to act as a fake source to confuse the adversary. Moreover, dummy traffic could be filtered efficiently by the cluster heads during the data aggregation, ensuring no energy consumption be burdened in the hotspot of the network. Through careful analysis and calculation on the distribution and the number of interference clusters, energy efficiency is significantly enhanced without reducing the network lifetime. Finally, the security and delay performance of MHCR scheme are theoretically analyzed. Extensive analysis and simulation results demonstrate that MHCR scheme can improve both the location privacy security and energy efficiency markedly, especially in large-scale WSNs.

Key words:wireless sensor networks; source-location privacy; energy efficiency; k-hop cluster; circular routing