A Comparative Study of Traffic Padding Schemes to Prevent Traffic Analysis in Sensor Networks

Wireless networks are envisioned to consist of large number of inexpensive and small nodes with sensing, data processing, and communication capabilities which are densely deployed in a region of interest and collaborate to accomplish a common task. One main challenge in design of these networks is their vulnerability to security attacks. However, there are various techniques exists in the literature like cryptography, stenography which are basically used to detect, and to protect the information from being detected by an attacker. But the experience shows, there are various overheads involved in their implementation like exchange of secret keys etc. So, in this paper we examine the role of tra c padding schemes in a sensor network which is concerned with protecting the user interest from being accessed by an attacker. To achieve the goal, there are two tra c padding schemes available, namely, source padding and link padding. We demonstrate that a link padding scheme can achieve better performance than a source padding scheme with lower power dissipation.