TCSLP: A trace cost based source location privacy protection scheme in WSNs for smart cities

In recent years, Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have played an important role in smart cities, which are a hot spot. More attentions have been paid to the security in smart cities. Source Location Privacy (SLP) protection is an essential problem in security. To enhance SLP in WSNs, in this paper, we propose a trace cost based source location privacy protection scheme (TCSLP) in WSNs for smart cities. First, we construct a phantom area to position phantom source nodes far away from the real source node. Second, we combine shortest path routing and random routing to send packets to improve the location privacy of the source node. Then, to decrease the trace speed of adversary, we design a special trace cost area, which consists of many sensor nodes with different weights in mountains, plains, and forest. Finally, packets are routed in a ring around the sink node. The ring consists of many nodes that are chosen from nearby grids. Compared with source location protection based on limited flooding (SLP) and enhanced source location protection protocol based on SLP (SLP-E), which allows the packet to be transmitted in any direction but fails to consider the overused nodes, our proposed scheme can avoid overused nodes and reduce overlapping path. Simulation results show that TCSLP can increase safety time and enhance SLP in WSNs for smart cities.