Abstract:

With the collaborative development of 5G/6G wireless communication technologies and novel intelligent networking technologies, three-dimensional distributed network architectures are gradually achieving full-domain coverage across space, air, land, and sea. In this network system, a large number of intelligent communication nodes form an autonomous multi-hop routing system through wireless interconnection, enabling dynamic information sharing. However, due to the broadcast nature of wireless channels, attackers can eavesdrop on network communication behaviors and perform correlation analysis to accurately reconstruct the message transmission path topology. Such path inference attacks directly expose the location privacy of the source node, destination node, and key relay nodes, posing a serious threat to network security. To address the need for path privacy protection in three-dimensional distributed wireless networks, this paper proposed a data transmission path obfuscation scheme based on spatial information obfuscation. Firstly, the three-dimensional Delaunay triangulation algorithm was adopted to discretize the network space into several irregular tetrahedral units, constructing the communication neighborhood set and the delaunay neighborhood set of nodes. Secondly, an optimal virtual relay position selection mechanism was designed, and a virtual position-guided directional message forwarding algorithm was developed by combining the topological features of the communication neighborhood and the Delaunay neighborhood. This algorithm, through distributed computation, precisely routed the data packet to the physical node closest to the virtual relay position (i.e., the randomized relay node), effectively decoupling the transmission path from the physical topology. Finally, the randomized relay node acted as a pseudo-source node to complete data delivery, enhancing the difficulty of path tracing through dual obfuscation in spatial and temporal dimensions. Simulation experiments show that by introducing a dynamic virtual relay mechanism, the proposed scheme reduces the density of effective packets in the channel by 42.7%, and decreases the success rate of path reconstruction attacks to below 12.3%, significantly enhancing the unlinkability of data transmission paths. This work provides a lightweight location privacy protection solution for three-dimensional distributed networks.

Key words: secure data transmission, wireless networks, privacy protection of paths, spatial location information