Base station location protection in wireless sensor networks: Attacks and defense

A base station (BS) is the controller and the data receiving center of a wireless sensor network. Hence, a reliable and secure BS is critical to the network. Once an attacker locates the BS, he can do a lot of damages to the network. In this paper, we study the BS location protection issue. First, we present a new attack on BS: the Parent-based Attack Scheme (PAS). The PAS can locate a BS within one radio (wireless transmission) range of sensors. Different from existing methods, the PAS determines the BS location based on parent-child relationship of sensor nodes. The PAS cannot be defended by existing BS protection schemes. To defend against the PAS, we design a new parent-free (PF) secure routing protocol for sensor networks. Our simulation results show that the PF protocol has small communication and computation costs, while ensuring the security of the BS.