Privacy Preservation of Source Location Using Phantom Nodes

Sensor networks are widely used for subject monitoring and tracking. In this modern era of wireless technology, privacy has become one of the essential concerns of wireless sensor networks. The location information of sensor nodes has to be hidden from an adversary for the sake of privacy. An adversary may trace the traffic and try to figure out the location of the source node. This can expose a significant amount of information about the subject being monitored which may be further misused by the adversary. This paper proposes 2-Phantom Angle-based Routing Scheme (2PARS) designed to improve the Source Location Privacy. The proposed scheme considers a triplet for selecting the phantom nodes. A triplet is a group of three nodes formed on the basis of their distance from the sink, their location information and the inclination angle between them. For every single packet transmission, phantom selection is performed thereby creating alternative paths. As the path changes dynamically, the safety period increases without any significant increase in the packet latency. The analysis shows that this scheme performs better in terms of safety period as compared to single phantom routing and multi-phantom routing schemes.