Energy Efficient Secure Routing in Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) can contain thousands of small, inexpensive sensors that are randomly deployed in open and harsh environments to collect data. The short lifespan of the battery-operated sensors and the hostile environments necessitate the development of energy ecient and secure protocols in sensor networks. Among the wide variety of network protocols, routing plays the most signicant role in energy consumption since 70% of the total energy is consumed for data transmission in WSNs. Therefore, it is necessary to design energy ecient routing schemes to conserve energy and prolong the network lifetime. However, resource limited sensors, lack of a global addressing scheme, and application-specic design of WSNs make routing a challenge. Furthermore, security is another critical issue in WSNs since sensors are generally deployed in unprotected environments and vulnerable to security attacks. The security algorithms have to be integrated with routing protocols to provide authenticity, condentiality, and integrity of transmitted data. Most of the existing routing protocols implement dierent security mechanisms to achieve the security goals. Any conflict among these measures may create vulnerabilities in the network. Therefore, to ensure energy eciency and minimisation of the implementation gap, energy ecient secure routing protocols have to be designed using a common security framework.