Opportunistic routing for enhanced source-location privacy in wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks are designed for a plethora of applications, such as unattended event monitoring and tracking. Source-privacy is one of the looming challenges that threaten successful deployment of these sensor networks, especially when they are used to monitor sensitive objects. In order to enhance source-location privacy in wireless sensor networks, we propose the use opportunistic routing schemes. In opportunistic routing, each sensor transmits the packet over a dynamic path to the destination. Every packet from the source can follow a different path toward the destination, making it difficult for an adversary to backtrack hop-by-hop to the origin of the sensor data. In the context of providing source location privacy for wireless sensor networks, the obtained simulation results demonstrate the efficiency and suitability of opportunistic routing in practical applications.