Maintaining trajectory privacy in mobile wireless sensor networks

Official URL: http://192.168.1.20/record=b1498744 (Table of Contents)

Sensors are tiny, resource-limited devices that are deployed in different areas to gather information for specific purposes. Wireless sensor networks consist of sensors with limited communication range and one or more sink nodes that are responsible for collecting the produced data by the sensors. Mobile wireless sensor networks is a subdomain of wireless sensor networks in which sensors and/or sinks are mobile. Trajectory privacy of the sink node is one of the security issues that are emerged with mobile wireless sensor networks. In this thesis, we propose a scheme for the trajectory privacy of mobile sink nodes. The proposed scheme is based on random distribution of data packets. In this scheme, sensor nodes do not use and need location information of the mobile sink or its trajectory. We performed simulation based and analytical performance evaluations for the proposed scheme. The results show that a network with up to 99% data delivery rate can be obtained by appropriate configuration of the scheme parameters while maintaining the trajectory privacy of the mobile sink node. In addition to that, the proposed scheme has economical resource usage since it does not involve any kind of cryptographic mechanism.