## 1 Introduction
The protocol incurs significant energy consumption, low PDR, and long EED due to the distribution of a large number of fake packets, some long routing paths, and long diversionary routes which diverge to the network border. The ProbR protocol considers transmission of two types of packets, fake packets and real packets as an efficient strategy to obfuscate an eavesdropping adversary. Real sources send packets to the sink node through phantom nodes. Concurrently, fake packets are transmitted to the sink node. The protocol achieves less effective SLP protection compared to the TreeR protocol. The TreeR and ProbR protocols have three main differences in their key features: (1) the TreeR employs fake source packets far away from the sink node, while ProbR employs fake source packets in the near-sink regions, (2) TreeR distributes a large amount of fake packets in the network while ProbR distributes only one fake packet at a time interval, and (3) TreeR distributes some fake packets near the phantom routes while ProbR locates the fake packet sources away from the phantom nodes. In this study, the performance of the TreeR and ProbR protocols were analyzed using five important performance metrics: safety period, attack success rate, energy consumption, PDR, and EED. Furthermore, two new phantom-based routing protocols, two-level phantom with a backbone route (PhaT), and two-level phantom with a pursue ring (PhaP) were proposed to address the limitations of TreeR and ProbR protocols, respectively. The proposed protocols introduced a new second level phantom node which was designed to provide a second level adversary confusion phase. A first level adversary confusion phase was provided by the first level phantom nodes which were adopted from the already existing phantom nodes in TreeR and ProbR. If an adversary embarked on back tracing the routing paths of the proposed protocols, it encountered two levels of adversary confusion phases. Consequently, the adversary made insignificant progress towards the source node and strong SLP protection was guaranteed. The packet routing process of the proposed PhaP and PhaT protocols was done in three phases. Phase 1 involved the process of packet routing between the source node and the first level phantom node. The strategies for phase 1 in the PhaP and PhaT were adopted from the ProbR and TreeR protocols, respectively. Phase 2 involved the process of packet routing between the first level phantom node and the new second level phantom node. A new routing strategy was proposed for phase 2 to ensure second level phantom nodes were randomly and tactically positioned in the network. The random positions guaranteed that the routing paths were highly unpredictable to the adversaries, for strong SLP protection. Phase 2 may be considered as a replacement of the fake packet sources which exist in the TreeR and ProbR. Phase 3 involved the process of packet routing between the second level phantom node and the sink node. In PhaP, phase 3 was accomplished by utilizing a directed random-walk routing strategy. In PhaT, phase 3 was accomplished by utilizing a random backbone route which was generated between the sink node and a neighboring node of the second level phantom node. By removing the fake packets in the network, the proposed PhaP and PhaT protocols achieved controlled energy consumption, PDR, and EED. The PhaP protocol preserved stronger SLP protection than its contender ProbR protocol. The communication overhead in PhaT protocol was significantly improved as compared to its contender TreeR protocol. Furthermore, unlike the TreeR protocol, PhaT was more capable of controlling the communication overhead under varied network conditions such as varied source packet rate, varied network size, and varied source-sink distance.