Tactile Routing for Location Privacy Preservation in Wireless Sensor Networks: A Game Theoretic Approach

Location Privacy Preservation (LPP) in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) during the era of the Internet of things and smart systems is a critical element in the success of WSNs. LPP in WSN can be stated as: given a WSN with an adversary aiming to unravel the location of critical nodes of a WSN, the goal of the WSN manager is to enshroud the location of the critical nodes via routing and/or encryption mechanisms. Typical research in the LPP of WSN routing involves developing and/or estimating the performance of a fixed routing protocol under a given attack mechanism. Motivated by advancements in network softwarization, in this work, we propose an approach where the WSN manager as well as the WSN adversary can deploy multiple routing and attack mechanisms, respectively. Initially, the proposed approach is formulated as a repeated two-player zero-sum game. The formulation is further extended to handle multiple objectives and incomplete information in the game matrix. In this work, the multiple objectives are handled via the epsilon constraint method. The presence of incomplete information in the formulation is modeled as interval based uncertainty. To sum, the proposed formulation ultimately boils down to linear programming problems, which can be efficiently solved. Numerical case studies to showcase the applicability of the proposed approach are illustrated in this work. Finally, discussion on obtaining the required data from any given WSN, discussion and interpretation of the formulation’s results, and future research direction of the current work is presented.