Lightweight Anonymous Geometric Routing for Internet of Things

Mobile service computing relies on efficient and secure data transfer. Geometric routing, which guarantees scalability, efficiency, and mobility, is a promising routing scheme for mobile services in the resource-constrained Internet of Things (IoT). However, the private data transmitted by geometric routing may be eavesdropped by the malicious node and the privacy-preserving becomes one of the important issues for the mobile service in IoTs. Due to the resource constrains, approaches using encryption or hashing are not suitable for geometric routing. In this paper, we propose a lightweight anonymous geometric routing (LAGER) to protect the node-related private data. Instead of using the encryption or hashing approach, LAGER adopts a coordinate confusion mechanism which provides each node an anonymous coordinate of virtual node, such that the private data is decoupled from the node coordinate. The malicious node cannot determine which node the data belongs to even if it obtains the private data. To support the data transmission with anonymous coordinates, LAGER adopts a hybrid routing scheme by combining the greedy routing and a source routing. The experiment results show that LAGER provides effective anonymity with acceptable costs of scalability and efficiency.