An experimental comparison of source location privacy methods for power optimization in WSNs

Wireless sensor technology may be envisioned as the promising substitute of traditional collaborative distributed schemes, especially for monitoring applications. However, the widespread adoption of such technology is being slowed down because of growing security concerns, specially critical in stationary sensor topologies which create new threats to the privacy of individuals and organizations. As a countermeasure against source observability and traceability, several source-location privacy solutions have been presented so far. The goal of this paper is twofold. We present an experimental comparison of the energy consumption of existing strategies (i.e. Flooding, Phantom and Fake Routing) as well as proposing a novel energy-aware approach aimed at disguising the real source in the presence of a global eavesdropper. A major finding of this preliminary work is that source anonymity is reached with minimum consumption.