Assessing the Performance of Phantom Routing on Source Location Privacy in Wireless Sensor Networks

As wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have been applied across a spectrum of application domains, the problem of source location privacy (SLP) has emerged as a significant issue, particularly in safety-critical situations. In seminal work on SLP, phantom routing was proposed as an approach to addressing the issue. However, results presented in support of phantom routing have not included considerations for practical network configurations, omitting simulations and analyses with larger network sizes. This paper addresses this shortcoming by conducting an in-depth investigation of phantom routing under various network configurations. The results presented demonstrate that previous work in phantom routing does not generalise well to different network configurations. Specifically, under certain configurations, it is shown that the afforded SLP is reduced by a factor of up to 75.