Energy-aware Secure Routing for Large Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract:- Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) are vulnerable to a wide set of attacks which threaten the network operation. Although communication and security technologies for computer networks have reached a mature stage, their applicability in WSNs is disputable due to their infrastructure-less operation and the limited node and network resources. Focusing on the routing procedure, this relies in the cooperation among neighboring nodes and a long list of attacks that can cause serious damage have already been identified. The situation is futher aggravated as the next generation wireless sensor network will be larger and larger. To face this problem, we propose a secure routing protocol (Ambient Trust Sensor Routing, ATSR) which adopts the geographical routing principle to cope with the network dimensions and part of the routing attacks, while it relies on a distributed trust model for the detection of another part of the routing attacks. Both direct and indirect trust information is taken into account to evaluate the trustworthiness of each neighbour. An important feature of the proposed routing solution is that it takes into account the remaining energy of each neighbour, thus allowing for better load balancing and network lifetime extension. Based on computer simulation results we evaluate the additional energy consumption caused by the exchange of indirect trust information and the benefits stemming from the adoption of our algorithm