Recent Advancements in Privacy-aware Protocols of Source Location Privacy in Wireless Sensor Networks: a Survey

This review article summarises the protocols proposed in recent researches to secure location information in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). Due to their lightweightness and easy to deploy properties, WSNs are widely used in numerous object tracking and monitoring applications. Due to such, source location privacy attracts the researchers and hence continuously enhances its improvement. Though, this privacy breach is not acceptable for WSNs, as it may reveal some critical information that is harmful. The SLP issue on WSN attracted researchers a lot, and hence a number of solutions are provided for it. However, an up-to-date survey does not exist for the same. To fill this gap, in this article, we summarize different approaches proposed in the last years to preserve location privacy. We first discuss the different privacy characteristics in WSNs, a detailed overview of the proposed protocols and their limitations, and discussions of solutions for the adversaries’ capabilities in WSNs. Then the future research directions in this area are discussed. This review work may support researchers identifying the new research area in location privacy of wireless sensor networks.