Opportunistic Sensor Networks: A Survey on Privacy and Secure Routing

With the advancement of mobile devices, a new paradigm called opportunistic sensor networks emerges which has a lot of applications, such as Military surveillance, disaster relief, search and rescue, vehicle tracking and much more. Opportunistic Sensor Network (OSN) has become one of the actively researched areas motivating researchers to come up with routing strategies and securing the routing with different lightweight techniques. In this paper, the focus is mainly on security and privacy mechanisms in opportunistic sensor networks keeping Military as a viewpoint. This paper is a pioneer attempt to classify most of the existing protocols in OSN also discusses the security requirements, threats, challenges and constraints posed by the opportunistic sensor network due to its intermittent, infrastructure-based or infrastructure-less nature. It also presents a clear distinction between Infrastructure-based and Infrastructure-less types of routing followed by a various technique. Finally, it concludes with the discussion of most of the algorithms used to achieve privacy and security in an opportunistic sensor network with suitable security achievements and security concerns.