Lightweight source anonymity in wireless sensor networks

Phillip Reindl, Xiaojiang Du, Kendall Nygard, Hongli Zhang

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

6 Scopus citations

Abstract

In many applications of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN), the source of an event needs to be protected. In resource constrained WSN, providing source anonymity is a challenging task. A traditional approach for hiding source in WSN is to let all nodes generate dummy data packets even if they have no event to report. However, this kind of approach introduces large overhead. In order to reduce the large overhead of sending dummy data packets, we propose using a much shorter control packet to achieve source anonymity. The short control packets are used to coordinate the transmissions of dummy data packets, which prevent revealing the source node and hence provides source anonymity in WSN. We evaluate the performance of our anonymity scheme via ns-2 simulations. The simulations show that our scheme has much less traffic overhead than an existing anonymity scheme.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publication2011 IEEE Global Telecommunications Conference, GLOBECOM 2011
DOIs
StatePublished - 2011
Event54th Annual IEEE Global Telecommunications Conference: "Energizing Global Communications", GLOBECOM 2011 - Houston, TX, United States
Duration: 5 Dec 20119 Dec 2011

Publication series

NameGLOBECOM - IEEE Global Telecommunications Conference

Conference

Conference54th Annual IEEE Global Telecommunications Conference: "Energizing Global Communications", GLOBECOM 2011
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityHouston, TX
Period5/12/119/12/11

Keywords

  • anonymity
  • dummy traffic
  • security
  • wireless sensor networks

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