Adaptive security provision for increased energy efficiency in Wireless Sensor Networks

This paper introduces a novel optimization strategy for increasing the resource efficiency and security of data routing in a wireless sensor network. Most secure routing schemes found in the literature provision security at the highest level by involving sophisticated data encryption with a large key. This imposes lots of overhead both in computation, while performing the encryption and decryption, and in communication due to bit padding. The proposed optimization approach strives to adapt the security measures to the trust level on the nodes on the path and factors in the security-related overhead in the link cost. In addition, a novel path rotation scheme is proposed to enable the use of resource-efficient security measures without risking an increase in vulnerability. The applicability of the proposed optimization is validated using the ad hoc on-demand multipath distance vector (AOMDV) routing protocol and its performance advantage is confirmed via ns2 simulation experiments.