## 2 Related Work
When a blast node on the edge of the ring receives packets for forwarding, it starts flooding in a controlled manner. The protocol provides three levels of confusion to the adversary: fake node level, phantom node level, and the blast ring level. Limitations of the protocol includes high energy consumption when the size of the blast ring increases due to the widening of the area with flooding nodes. In the distributed protocol that combines fake source and phantom source routing, when a node wishes to transmit a packet to the sink node, it first floods a fake request packet into the network with a maximum hop count. Every node which receives the fake request packet checks their remaining energy levels and checks the number of times it has become a real source in the previous sessions. If a node has been a regular real source in the past, then it is disqualified from being a candidate fake source. If the energy level of the node is above a threshold value and it has not been a regular real source in recent sessions, then the node becomes a good candidate for fake source. The node computes a random number between 0 and 1. If the random number is greater than 0.5 then the node is selected as a fake source otherwise it ignores the request. When the node is selected as a fake source, it starts sending fake packets which are identical to real packets into the network. Subsequently, the source node selects a random node located at a distance away to act as a phantom node. After a phantom node is selected, the source node sends packets to the sink node through the selected phantom node. The main limitations of the protocol include high energy consumption due to the fake packet routing. Also, the protocol may incur long EED and low PDR due to packet collisions which may result from the simultaneous transmission of real packets and fake packets. Although many routing strategies exist in the literature, a limited number of studies have addressed the limitations of the recently proposed fake packet routing protocols. Specifically, multilevel phantom node routing strategies have not been widely explored as an approach to address the limitations of fake packet routing protocols. In this study, we address the limitations of the fake packet routing protocols in References [4; 20] by using two-level phantom routing protocols. In its baseline form, the phantom routing protocol is cost-effective. However, it offers low levels of SLP protection. We take advantage of the cost-effective phantom routing protocol. We propose two new two-level phantom routing protocols which offer high levels of SLP protection. The proposed protocols are PhaP and PhaT protocols. The PhaP protocol offers higher levels of SLP protection than the protocol in Reference [20]. Furthermore, the PhaP protocol achieves controlled energy consumption, PDR, and EED. In the near-sink region, the PhaP protocol achieves lower energy consumption than the protocol in Reference [20]. The PhaT protocol offers slightly lower levels of SLP protection than the protocol in Reference [4]. Nonetheless, the privacy protection of PhaT is effectively high. Comparing the communication overhead of the PhaT protocol and the protocol in Reference [4], the PhaT protocol achieves significantly lower energy consumption, significantly higher PDR, and lower EED.