Defending Traffic Analysis with Communication Cycles in Wireless Sensor Networks

In wireless sensor networks, sensor nodes collect and forward environmental data back to the base station via multi-hop communications and nodes closer to the base station take relatively heavier communication loads. Therefore, an attacker may identify the location of the base station and cause security breaches by analyzing the network traffic. In this paper, we create traffic decoys that also sustain higher communication traffic to mask the location of the base station. Compared with previous approaches, our method provides a defending mechanism against attackers with global monitoring capability, thus the true location of the base station can be better protected.