Source location privacy using data mules in Wireless Sensor Networks
Jyoti Prakash Singh, Pradeep Kumar Roy, Sunil Kumar Singh, Prabhat Kumar · 2016
For Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) monitoring an asset, source location privacy happens to be an important issue. In recent times, mobile data collector (data mule) has been utilized to collect data sensed by a number of sensor nodes and submit it to the base station directly by moving near to it. The main task of data mule is the reliable and energy-efficient data collection in WSNs. In this article, we have tried to augment data mules with the extra responsibility of protecting data source location along with their normal data collection task. We have divided the total area of wireless sensor network into several layers, each having some data mules. Each mule collects data from sensor nodes in its layer and forwards it to the mule of next higher layer. Finally data reaches to the base station or sink node without disclosing any location information of the source node. This paper also analyses the delay incurred due to usages of data mules in layers for data collection task thorough simulation.