Quantitative security and efficiency analysis of SEAR in wireless sensor networks

SEAR is a novel secure and energy aware routing protocol proposed to address the energy balance and routing security through a balanced energy consumption and probabilistic random walking. Recently, a quantitative security measurement scheme for source-location privacy based on source-location disclosure index (SDI) and source-location space index (SSI) has been proposed. In this paper, we first derive a numerical formula to quantitatively estimate the routing efficiency through the number of routing hops for a given routing security level. We then consider the reverse problem: For a given routing cost factor, how to determine the maximum security level for a message to be transmitted. Our simulation results demonstrate that the theoretical results provide a very tight estimation of the actual routing hops for various security parameters. Finally, we prove that the SEAR scheme can provide provable security under the quantitative security measurement criteria.