An energy efficient cooperative approach for anonymous wireless communications

The inherent characteristics of wireless communications pose great challenges to ensure anonymity during information exchange. When improving anonymity, it is also important to minimize the energy consumption of the proposed solution, since it is a fundamental requirement to prolong the network lifetime. To balance anonymity and energy consumption, this paper introduces a cooperative approach where selected nodes are formed into pairs to exchange both real and fake data before forwarding them to the Base Station (BS). The selection criterion of node pairs is based on a cross-layer method that considers the transmission rate, the traffic pattern and the intermodal distance to guarantee anonymity with minimum energy consumption. Thus, this prevents the attacker from inferring confidential information of the wireless communication system and saves energy at the network nodes. Comprehensive computer-based simulations were undertaken and the simulation results verify a noticeable energy saving in comparison with a not cooperative approach.