On providing location privacy for mobile sinks in wireless sensor networks

A common practice in sensor networks is to collect sensing data and report them to the sinks or to some pre-defined data rendezvous points via multi-hop communications. Attackers may locate the sink easily by reading the destination field in the packet header or predicting the arrival of the sink at the rendezvous points, which opens up vulnerabilities to location privacy of the sinks. In this paper, we propose a random data collection scheme to protect the location privacy of mobile sinks in wireless sensor networks. Data are forwarded along random paths and stored at the intermediate nodes probabilistically in the network. The sinks will move around randomly to collect data from the local nodes occasionally, which prevents the attackers from predicting their locations and movements. We analyze different kind of attacks threatening the location privacy of the sinks in sensor networks. We also evaluate the delivery rate, data collection delay and protection strength of our scheme by both analysis and simulations. Both analytical and simulation results show that our scheme can protect location privacy of mobile sinks effectively, while providing satisfactory data collection services.