Opportunistic Routing for Enhanced Source-location Privacy in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSN) are an attractive solution for a plethora of communication applications, such as unattended event monitoring and tracking. One of the looming challenges that threaten the successful deployment of these sensor networks is source-location privacy, especially when they are used to monitor sensitive objects. In order to enhance source location privacy in sensor networks, we propose the use of an opportunistic routing scheme and we examine four different approaches. In opportunistic routing, each sensor transmits the packet over a dynamic path to the destination. Every packet from the source can therefore follow a different path toward the destination, making it difficult for an adversary to backtrack hop-by-hop to the origin of the sensor communication. Through theoretical analysis, we attempt to justify the use of opportunistic routing for the source-location problem. Moreover, simulations have been conducted in order to evaluate the performance of all the proposed schemes, in terms of source-location privacy.