A self-adjusting directed random walk approach for enhancing source-location privacy in sensor network routing

ABSTRACT

Source-location privacy is a sensor network privacy that is quite different from content privacy, which could be protected by usual network security techniques. In a sensor network environment, the wireless medium is shared. An adversaries may trace back to the source sensor hop by hop with signal localization devices. In order to enhance source-location privacy, a technique called phantom routing [8] has emerged. Phantom routing consists of two phases: random walk to create phantom sources and a subsequent routing phase to deliver a message to the sink. Random walk phase plays an important role in phantom routing. Two approaches, which are sector-based directed random walk and hop-based directed random walk, could be applied to random walk phase. However, it is observed that the performance of those two random walk approaches will drop if the source locates in certain regions of the sensing field. The reason is that a message may be blocked at a node because no neighbors are available in the direction chosen by the source at beginning. This will result in the premature termination of the random walk phase. In this paper, a self-adjusting directed random walk technique is proposed. This approach is able to adjust the direction of the random walk based on the estimation of the current node's relative location to the source when a message is blocked. From the results of simulation, self-adjusting directed random walk solves above problem and shows an improvement on the overall performance of phantom routing.

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INDEX TERMS

Classification:
  C. Computer Systems Organization
  C.2 COMPUTER-COMMUNICATION NETWORKS
      C.2.2 Network Protocols
          Subjects: Routing protocols

General Terms:
Algorithms, Security

Keywords:
sensor networks privacy, source-location privacy