On providing location privacy for mobile sinks in wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks have attracted increasing attentions considering their potentials for being widely adopted in both emerging civil and military applications. A common practice of sensor networks is to collect data from the sensors and report the data to the sinks or to some pre-defined data rendezvous points via multi-hop communications. Attackers may locate a sink easily by reading the destination field in the packet header or predicting the arrival of a sink at the rendezvous points, which opens up vulnerabilities to location privacy of the sinks. In this work, we propose a random data collection scheme to protect the location privacy of mobile sinks in sensor networks. Data are forwarded along some random paths and stored at random nodes in the network. The sinks move around along some random paths to collect data from the local nodes occasionally, which prevents the attackers from predicting their locations and movements. We analyze different attacks threatening the location privacy of the sinks in sensor networks. We also evaluate the delivery rate, data collection delay and protection strength of our scheme by both analysis and simulations. The results show that our scheme can provide location privacy of mobile sinks effectively, while providing satisfactory data collection services. Copyright 2009 ACM.