Increasing Source Privacy and Network Lifetime without Affecting Latency: a Strategic Random Walk for WSNs*

Remote monitoring in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) requires enhanced privacy and long-term monitoring of objects or events without escalating delay. To address this problem, a strategic random walk routing for protecting source location privacy (SRWSLP) in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) is proposed in this article. The proposed technique routes the packets from the source node to the base station (BS) using three phases of routing, namely: i) adaptive backward random walk (A-BRW), ii) adaptive equal depth routing (A-EDR), and iii) forward random walk (FRW). In order to give an impression to a backtracking attacker that the routing pathways are dynamic, the A-BRW and A-EDR phases are designed to carefully route the packets away from the source node in the first two phases of routing. In the third phase, the packets are sent to the base station (BS) using the forward random walk. The objective of the solution is to achieve improved privacy and network lifetime without affecting delay. Simulation results have demonstrated that the proposed technique performs better than the existing random walk class of SLP techniques.