Achieving Reliability of Privacy-preserving Phantom Routing Protocols in Multi-hop Wireless Sensor Networks

Due to the open nature of wireless channels and sensor node resource constraints, it is challenging to secure the communication in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) while simultaneously protecting the privacy of node location data. Therefore, a significant amount of research focusing on source location privacy (SLP) protocols has been conducted. The amount of research on SLP reliability, meanwhile, is insignificant. This study explores the operational features of various privacy-preserving phantom routing protocols and simulates WSNs with varied network configurations to investigate how different routing strategies affect SLP reliability. Safety period and capture ratio metrics are used to compute SLP reliability. Simulation results show that integration of phantom routing with fake packet distribution mechanisms adversely impacts SLP reliability. SLP reliability decreases also as the number of fake packet sources increases. Research proves that a protocol with many fake packet sources achieves SLP reliability for a mission duration of 940 rounds, while a protocol with no fake packet sources achieves SLP reliability for 1658 rounds.