A Novel Approach for Boosting Base Station Anonymity in a WSN

Nodes in a wireless sensor network scrutinize the nearby region and transmit their findings to the base station (BS) using multi-hop transmission. As the BS plays an important role in a wireless sensor network, therefore an adversary who wants to interrupt the operation of the network would avidly look for the BS location and imposes maximum damage by destroying the BS physically. The multi-hop data transmission towards BS makes a prominent pattern of the traffic (huge traffic near the BS region) that indicates the presence of BS in the nearby region and thus the location of the BS may expose to the adversaries. This work aims to provide a novel approach which will increase the BS anonymity. For this purpose, a randomly roamed BS and the special nodes are proposed to achieve the above mentioned objective. The special nodes produce a large number of high traffic regions, which are similar to the BS region. Now, there are many regions which look like BS region and hence the probability to get the BS region using traffic analysis is very low. Therefore, this approach increases the effort of adversaries in order to find the exact BS position. We have used a standard entropy model to measure the anonymity of the base station and the GSAT test is used to calculate the number of steps required to find the base station. The results show that the proposed technique provides better results in terms of anonymity compared to the existing techniques. Keywords—Anonymity; network lifetime; wireless sensor networks