Enhancing sink-location privacy in global-eavesdropper sensor networks

In this paper, we focus on protecting the sink's location when global-eavesdropper exists in wireless sensor networks. The adversary is assumed to have the ability to monitor all the communications of the network, which means that she can follow a route of a message and find the location of sink node easily. In this case, we introduce several fake sinks to confuse the adversary such that she has to travel through these nodes one by one to locate the real sink node. While developing our privacy-aware routing protocols, we jointly consider issues of delivery time as well as the amount of energy consumed by the sensor networks. To solve this constraint optimization problem, we utilize simulated annealing (SA) algorithm and return an optimal solution that corresponds to the lexicographic ordering approach. The new defense system makes it very hard for adversaries to perform analysis on globally gathered information and infer the direction to where the sink node locates. The result shows that under bounded safe delivery time, the energy cost of the system provided by our algorithm is global minimum.