With the development of the Internet of Things (IoT), Smart Data, which effectively support the IoT for planning, operation, monitoring, control, and intelligent decision making, has received extensive interest by researchers. However, the security of the data source has not been entirely resolved. Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are vital components of the IoT for event monitoring and information gathering. Recently, source location privacy (SLP) protection in WSNs has attracted attentions as an approach to prevent adversaries from performing a backtracking strategy to capture the data sources. In view of the characteristics of the sensor nodes, the restricted computing power and the energy resource, we propose a sector-based random routing (SRR) scheme to address the SLP problem and reduce the energy consumption. In the SRR, the data packets are sent to random phantom sources that are located in different sectors and are distributed in all directions to reach the sink node. In addition, the concept of a hop threshold is presented to control the routing strategies and reduce the energy consumption. The theoretical analysis and experimental results prove that the proposed protocol efficiently reduces backtracking and direction attacks while safekeeping the balance between security and network lifetime.

Introduction

The Internet of Things (IoT), in which numerous physical objects are connected to collect and exchange data, has been applied in various domains, such as home automation, patient and industrial monitoring, smart cities, and smart infrastructures [1-2]. In recent years, Smart Data, which refers to valuable data without noise, has played an important role in supporting the development of the IoT. However, researchers have not entirely solved the security issue related to the location of the data origin. As fundamental components of the IoT for event monitoring and information gathering, wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are comprised of abundant resource-constrained and non-rechargeable sensor nodes that are self organized [3-5]. Unlike wired networks, WSNs are flexible to adapt to complex application scenarios. However, with an appropriate wireless device, a person can monitor the communication signals in a wireless sensor domain [6]. In spite of encryption techniques that protect the communication content exchanged between two sensor nodes, the adversaries mostly use powerful equipment for locating the message source by monitoring the communication patterns between the nodes without accessing the communication content. Therefore, many researchers have focused on source location privacy (SLP) protection in recent years. SLP is a significant and challenging security issue [6]. In the absence of SLP, vital information on the physical objective may be revealed. Numerous research studies related to SLP have been conducted in the last decade. Ozturk et al. [7] proposed the classical Panda-Hunter Game and the phantom routing algorithm. Wang et al. [8] first presented the concept of a visible area. Yao et al. [9] put forward a scheme based on a multi-ring centered at the sink node. Chen et al. [10] used constrained offset angles and probabilistic routing to balance the energy consumption and the security requirements. However, to our best knowledge, most existing schemes do not consider balancing energy consumption and security based on the location of the source node.