Hidden Anchor: A Lightweight Approach for Physical Layer Location Privacy

In hybrid wireless sensor networks, where trusted and un-trusted nodes coexist, it becomes important to allow trusted nodes to share information, especially, location information and prevent un-trusted nodes from gaining access to this information. The authors focus on anchor-based localization algorithms in WSNs, where a small set of specialized nodes, that is, anchor nodes, broadcast their location to the network and other nodes can use the broadcast information to estimate their own location. The main challenge is that both trusted and un-trusted nodes can measure the physical signal transmitted from anchor nodes and use it to estimate their locations. In this paper, they propose Hidden Anchor, an algorithm that provides anchor physical layer location privacy for different classes of localization algorithms.