Abstract
Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) receive significant attention due to the wide area of applications: environment monitoring, tracking, target detection, etc. At the same time, in some cases, the captured information from the WSN might be considered as private, for example, location of an important asset. Thus, security mechanisms might be essential to ensure the confidentiality of the location of the information source. In this chapter, the authors present an approach called iHIDE (information HIding in Distributing Environments) to enable source-location privacy in WSNs. iHIDE adopts a non-geographical, overlay routing method for packet delivery. This chapter presents the architecture and assesses its performance through simulation experiments, providing comparisons with relative approaches.
TopIhide Architecture And Routing Plan
Before describing in details the iHIDE scheme, it is essential to define what we consider as Location Information (LocInfo). As LocInfo we use a variation of the definition introduced in (Kamat et al., 2005), i.e., we use the triple of the following form: {SensorID, RTargetID, Time}. Thus, LocInfo is defined as a combination of sensor that identifies the target, the identification of the target, and the time instance of the target existence.
iHIDE consists of the following functional elements and structures: Sensing Nodes (SEN), Bus Nodes (BUN), one Sink Node (SIN), one Bus andseveral Rings. We could visualize this through a configuration that consists of one rope with Rings attached to it (Figure 1). SENs organize the Ring structures, whilst BUNs construct the Bus structure (i.e. the rope). As previously mentioned, we assume static sensors and mobile targets. In this static structure, every iHIDE node, SEN or BUN, forwards packets according to a specific plan, called Routing Plan (RP). This plan concerns all the sensors, and it is constructed and distributed periodically by a central authority, e.g., the sink, which maintains prior knowledge of the field and the network structure.