An energy-efficient and sink-location privacy enhanced scheme for WSNs through ring based routing

• A Ring Based Routing (RBR) scheme to address the sink-location privacy is proposed.
• The RBR scheme is composed of multiple routing rings and routing lines.
• All data is routed through each node in the ring.
• RBR scheme have high network lifetime, high network security and high energy efficiency.

Sink location privacy is one of the major issues in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) where adversaries may locate the sink by observing the destination of packets, directing and scaling of data flow, which leads to exposure of the sink-location privacy. In this paper, we propose a Ring Based Routing (RBR) scheme to address the issue of sink-location privacy in WSNs. The RBR scheme is composed of multiple routing rings and routing lines where the nodal data is not directly sent to the sink but to the nearest routing ring. In our scheme, data is routed through each node in the ring and then sent to other routing rings via routing lines, where the number of anonymity sink nodes is equal to the total number of nodes in the network. More specifically, under the RBR scheme the routing rings move in irregular patterns which can confuse adversaries even if the sink location is static and this greatly improves the sink-location privacy. In addition, the routing rings are constructed according to comprehensive analysis of network energy, which can fully use the remaining energy and improve energy efficiency and network lifetime. Both theoretical analysis and simulation results show that our scheme can protect location privacy of sinks effectively.