ACP: Anonymous communication protocol fo wireless sensor networks

Communication privacy techniques that protect the locations of source sensor nodes and sink nodes have received significant attention recently. Several communication protocols that improve the capture time, which is the time it takes for an adversary to identify the location of the source, have been proposed and their effectiveness is analyzed using simulation models. A simple anonymous communication protocol (ACP) to hide source sensor nodes locations is proposed. ACP renders an adversary with complete understanding of ACP design and operation and with extensive computational and radio monitoring resources perform no better than an adversary who tries to identify sources by randomly checking sensor nodes. ACP achieves this by ensuring that (a) each node transmit a packet in each active period regardless whether it has data to send or not, and (b) dummy packets be indistinguishable from real packets based on the contents. A simple analytical model and extensive simulations are used to show that ACP effectively randomizes sources locations. Energy consumption analysis shows that the increased energy cost owing to transmissions in every active cycle is a small fraction of the overall energy consumption by sensor nodes.