A Hybrid Approach for Preserving Source Location Privacy for Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

The advancing development in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) has led to its immense applications in location-based services. However, along with various advantages it suffers from privacy concerns. The protection of location information of the sensor node that reports the occurrence of an event in its sensing range is very important. In this paper, we propose a hybrid approach of randomized and angular routing that is guaranteed at preserving the location of the source. The proposed scheme makes use of fake packets to create a time discrepancy in backtracking the packet flow that increases difficulty for the adversaries. Even though the use of fake packets to create traffic leads to a slight increase in energy consumption, it has also provided a higher level of security to source node. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2025.