Lightweight source anonymity in wireless sensor networks

In many applications of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN), the source of an event needs to be protected. In resource constrained WSN, providing source anonymity is a challenging task. A traditional approach for hiding source in WSN is to let all nodes generate dummy data packets even if they have no event to report. However, this kind of approach introduces large overhead. In order to reduce the large overhead of sending dummy data packets, we propose using a much shorter control packet to achieve source anonymity. The short control packets are used to coordinate the transmissions of dummy data packets, which prevent revealing the source node and hence provides source anonymity in WSN. We evaluate the performance of our anonymity scheme via ns-2 simulations. The simulations show that our scheme has much less traffic overhead than an existing anonymity scheme.