Hiding the Source Based on Limited Flooding for Sensor Networks

Sensors

Juan Chen¹  Zhengkui Lin¹  Ying Hu¹  Bailing Wang² 

[1] Department of Information Science and Technology, Dalian Maritime University, Dalian 116026, China; E-Mails:;Department of Computer Science, Harbin Institute of Technology, Weihai 264209, China

关键词: wireless sensors network;    internet of things;    source location;    privacy protection;    security;   

DOI  :  10.3390/s151129129

来源: mdpi

【 摘 要 】

Wireless sensor networks are widely used to monitor valuable objects such as rare animals or armies. Once an object is detected, the source, i.e., the sensor nearest to the object, generates and periodically sends a packet about the object to the base station. Since attackers can capture the object by localizing the source, many protocols have been proposed to protect source location. Instead of transmitting the packet to the base station directly, typical source location protection protocols first transmit packets randomly for a few hops to a phantom location, and then forward the packets to the base station. The problem with these protocols is that the generated phantom locations are usually not only near the true source but also close to each other. As a result, attackers can easily trace a route back to the source from the phantom locations. To address the above problem, we propose a new protocol for source location protection based on limited flooding, named SLP. Compared with existing protocols, SLP can generate phantom locations that are not only far away from the source, but also widely distributed. It improves source location security significantly with low communication cost. We further propose a protocol, namely SLP-E, to protect source location against more powerful attackers with wider fields of vision. The performance of our SLP and SLP-E are validated by both theoretical analysis and simulation results.

【 授权许可】

CC BY   
© 2015 by the authors; licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.