## 4 The Proposed Method: SLP-E
### Protocol Execution Phase
#### 4.2.2 Scenario-2
It is also seen that both NLT and entropy measurements exhibit comparable increases (see Table 2). The NLT metric's negative value shows that PRLRPW performs worse than the SPR (no SLP) scheme. We want to emphasize that the PRLRPW protocol was suggested and evaluated by the authors for multi-asset scenarios. However, in our research, we have only tested this technique for the situation of a single-asset scenario. We stress that the metric capture ratio has a negative value because it reflects the degree of information loss from the viewpoint of the network administrator. The success rate of the attacker is lowered and the SLP protocol's privacy strength is increased with decreasing values of the capture ratio measure. SLP-E is found to have a lower capture ratio statistic than the SLP-R, SRR, and PRLRPW schemes. Higher energy usage and delay come at the expense of SLP-E's increased privacy strength and NLT. In other words, if privacy must be improved, energy usage per packet and delay must be given up. As a result, we discover that the suggested solution uses somewhat more energy and has a little longer delay than any competing schemes. Future efforts could focus on enhancing these metrics. According to our research, the safety period and network lifespan measures have demonstrated enhanced performances and behavior that is independent of distance. Consequently, the goal of achieving balanced, uniform, and improved privacy and network lifetime measures has been attained. The results of our study suggest that metrics such as entropy and capture ratio continue to behave in a distance-dependent manner. In other words, the values of these two measures vary depending on where the source is located within the network. \begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{c c c c c c c} \hline \hline
**Metrics vs. Protocol** & **Safety Period** & **Capture Ratio** & **Entropy** & **Energy Consumption** & **Delay** & **Network Lifetime** \\ \hline SLP-R & 5024 & –50 & 17,001 & 17,857 & 318 & 28 \\ \hline SRR & 3185 & –10 & 10,287 & 10,726 & 241 & 49.8 \\ \hline PRLRPW & 2803 & –48 & 10,551 & 7892 & 228 & –18 \\ \hline PSSLP & 5479 & –72 & 20,701 & 22,432 & 393 & 33 \\ \hline SLP-E & 6379 & –60 & 22,996 & 29,923 & 463 & 50 \\ \hline \hline \end{tabular}
\end{table} 
Table 2: Summary of performance characterization. ### Future Research Direction

Based on the findings, we suggest that future research can focus on developing a multi-objective optimization that takes care of sensor spacing, radio range, etc., as optimization parameters to provide an optimal solution. It is strongly believed that q-learning-based approaches can be employed to provide optimal solutions. There are works in the literature that have focused on q-learning-based solutions for routing purposes. However, to the best of our knowledge, there is no work that exists that has explored a reinforcement learning approach for providing SLP solutions. So, there is scope to explore this dimension, too. Another research direction that can be looked at is the optimal choice for the threshold concept that we used in this work. Although the threshold value of R/4 taken to decide scenario-1 and scenario-2 in the proposed solutions is arbitrary, we were motivated by the fact that nodes near the BS have to expend more energy compared to the nodes that are closer to the network edge. Investigating the ideal size and quantity of these network segments used to improve privacy and security may be another study area. Additionally, future research may focus on more exploring and handling the trade-offs between energy consumption, packet delay metrics, and source location privacy level seen in SLP-E and in other existing SLP solutions. ## 9 Conclusions

In this article, we suggest a novel privacy-preserved routing scheme that enhances privacy and network lifetime for WSNs. The performance of the suggested method shows an improvement in the safety period and network lifespan by 6379% and 50%, respectively, when compared with no privacy routing technique (SPR).