Source-Location Privacy Protection in Wireless Sensor Networks using AZR Routing

In environments where sensor networks are deployed to monitor certain events or sensitive objects, attackers may deduce the approximated location of monitored objects by hop-by-hop backtracking the traffic. This paper proposes a routing technique to provide adequate source-location privacy with balanced energy consumption, the Phantom Routing based on Annular Zone (AZR). With this technique, the entire network is divided into several layers according the distance between the nodes to the SINK node. The source node randomly selects a phantom source within the same layer when the source node is far away from the SINK node. Otherwise, the phantom source is selected in the FAR layers randomly. The message will then be routed from the source node to the phantom source through the annular routing path. The AZR protocol ensures that the phantom node is distributed uniformly in the entire network, and the routing path from the source to the SINK avoids the one-hop dangerous zone from the SINK. While ensuring source-location privacy, our simulation results prove that the proposed scheme can provide performance better than the existing schemes.