Comprehensive Performance Analysis of Privacy Protection Protocols Utilizing Fake Packet Injection Techniques

In many Internet of Things (IoT) systems and monitoring wireless sensor networks (WSNs), sensor nodes are expected to function for prolonged periods of time with no scope of recharging the sensor node batteries. Similarly, in safety-critical monitoring applications, the WSNs are expected to guarantee effective source location privacy (SLP) protection throughout the network lifetime. Fake packet-based SLP protocols are often energy-inefficient, they incur short network lifetime, and have high probability of packet collision events. Therefore, it is important to evaluate features such as the capability of the protocols to guarantee effective SLP protection for prolonged periods of time and reliable packet delivery. The existing studies show some deficit in the performance evaluation of the protocols. Consequently, this paper presents some investigations on the performance of the fake packet-based SLP protocols. Comprehensive performance analysis of four existing protocols is done under varied network parameters and configurations. Performance is observed under varied sensor node residual energy, source-sink distance, lifetime, source packet rate, network size, and node density. Analysis results establish that the protocols are capable of achieving high levels of SLP protection. However, the privacy protection is short-lived. Furthermore, the results show that long source-sink distance, long fake packet routes, short distance between fake packet sources and phantom nodes, and large amounts of fake packet traffic can improve the SLP protection while diminishing the packet delivery reliability, energy efficiency, and the network lifetime. The results also show that when the source packet rate is increased it influences some negative effects on the performance of the protocols. Moreover, it is observed that integrating fake packet routing and packet flooding techniques can impact some positive effects on the SLP protection and negative effects on the network lifetime. Based on the observations and analysis results, some recommendations are presented to improve the performance of the protocols.