WSN Routing Protocols: Anonymity Prospective Analysis

A Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is composed of a number of sensor nodes and a single Base-Station (BS), distributed randomly in an area of interest. WSNs have proven very beneficial in various applications in unattended setup in many domains such as scientific, civil, and military. In these applications, sensors send their measurements to the Base Station over multi-hop wireless routes where the Base Station is responsible for collecting and processing the sensed data. Given the importance of the BS, a potential attacker would look to locate the base station by examining network traffic patterns in order to launch specific attacks intended to interfere with network functionality. In this paper, we analyze traffic analysis attack models from the viewpoint of an adversary. Additionally, we examine the benefits and drawbacks of various routing protocols in terms of exposing the network to traffic analysis attacks. Our evaluation is supported by simulation results.