Hybrid Random Routing Protocol to Enhance the Performance of Routing Protocol in Source Location Privacy Using Ant Colony Optimization and Random Walk

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are networks of hundreds of sensor networks that are connected wirelessly. Often they are deployed in areas that are unreachable to humans. Their power source primarily consists of small batteries. One of the primary purposes of WSNs is to collect data from a location and send it to the base station. However, the information's location and sensitivity make it a critical safety task. Hence, WSN must take strong measures to protect the information and its location from outside adversarial attacks. The networks are also susceptible to passive adversaries' analytical assaults. Under adversarial analysis attacks, the adversary collects information from the network using traffic analysis. By this, they can access private information like sensor node locations, such as those that monitor endangered animals. The adversary can use the inforrnation to locate the animal's exact location, leaving it vulnerable to poaching by poachers. Therefore, to prevent this, the privacy of the source location is necessary. Source Location Privacy (SLP) provides security for such operations. Several techniques, such as ring routing, flooding, randomwalk are used to provide SLP for WSNs. In this paper, we propose a novel Hybrid technique that combines fake packages and randomness to enhance the SLP of WSNs. The proposed method utilizes a random walk-based algorithm for sending the real data packet to the sink and an Ant Colony optimization-based approach for sending the false packet. Our proposed hybrid routing protocol delivers communication and privacy efficiency. The privacy protection performance of the proposed Hybrid protocol is measured using the Packet Delivery Ratio (PDR), Safety Period (SP), and Capture Ratio (CR).