An efficient anonymous communication protocol for wireless sensor networks

Anonymous communication is very important for many wireless sensor networks, because it can be used to hide the identity of important nodes, such as the base station and a source node. In sensor networks, anonymous communication includes several important aspects, such as source anonymity, communication relationship anonymity, and base station anonymity. Existing sensor network anonymous schemes either cannot achieve all the anonymities or have large computation, storage, and communication overheads. In this paper, we propose an efficient anonymous communication protocol for sensor networks that can achieve all the anonymities while having small overheads on computation, storage, and communication. We compare our anonymous communication protocol with several existing schemes, and the results show that our protocol provides strong anonymity protection and has low overheads. Copyright (c) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.