Location Concealing Probabilistic Routing for Wireless Sensor Networks

A.A. Nezhad, D. Makrakis, and A. Miri (Canada)

Keywords

Wireless sensors, routing, location privacy, anonymity

Abstract

We propose a routing protocol for wireless sensor networks that supports location privacy for source and destination as well as user anonymity and unlinkability. This protocol is based on label switching and does not use node identities for routing. The sink is assumed to be computationally powerful and responsible for most routing setup. It assigns incoming and outgoing labels to nodes in the uplink and downlink directions as well as informs them of which end-to-end paths they belong to. Each sensor is only aware of its own labels and the end to-end paths on which it lies. When forwarding a packet, a sensor chooses one of its outgoing paths and the corresponding outgoing link randomly, which causes an end-to-end data flow to scatter across the network, making it difficult for a location-limited eavesdropper to trace the path of packets back to their source or the sink. To account for limited capabilities of sensors, our protocol relies only on symmetric cryptography.

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