Energy efficient secure routing in wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks can provide low cost solution to variety of real-world problems. As sensors have limited power, any security mechanism for the sensor network must be energy efficient. In this work we propose an energy efficient secure routing for wireless sensor networks based on dynamic key cryptography. We propose a Weight Based AODV protocol for the routing process in which the weight of a route is decided by four factors: the speed of nodes, the power level of battery and the Bandwidth. The sensor nodes are organized into clusters and a cluster head is elected within each cluster. Communication between sensor and the sink takes place at the three levels: sensor→cluster-head→sink. A new key management scheme for wireless sensor networks is used to reduce the memory and communication overhead, and improve the security of the network. Results obtained by a simulation campaign show that WBAODV has some important advantages that makes it a valuable candidate to be particularly suitable in environments where fast communication establishment and minimum signalling overhead are requested. Also simulation results show the improvement of the network performance, in terms of Throughput, Energy, and Hop Count, through use of the new routing algorithm.