Context Oriented Source Location Privacy Protection Techniques for Event Monitoring Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Location privacy is one of the most challenging threats that has grown to acquire attention across the globe. Wireless sensor network (WSN) where the transmission occurs through multiple hops between the nodes suffers from attacks such as backtracking and directional attacks by the adversaries. As an analogy, sensor nodes employed in wildlife monitoring region to constantly monitor their presence and activities are threatened by attackers. The attackers constantly monitor the transmission with the objective of locating the source node ultimately leading to poaching. In order to do away with these threats leading to location disclosure, various routing mechanisms that involves phantom node, fake packets and fake source nodes have been proposed time and then by various researchers. In this paper we present a comprehensive study of various routing mechanisms for source location privacy preservation that are compared on four parameters: i. safety period ii. energy consumption iii. Packet latency iv. Network life time. Different routing mechanisms are analyzed in detail and future scope for improvement is provided to enhance further research.