A New Mechanism for Achieving Secure and Reliable Data Transmission in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks must be designed to be both secure and reliable, especially when they are used in national security and safety-critical applications. In this paper, we propose a new mechanism, called MVMP (multi-version multi-path), which integrates data segmentation, Forward Error Correction coding, multiple paths, and multiple versions of cryptographic algorithms for achieving both secure and reliable data transmission in sensor networks. The MVMP is also energy-aware in that each piece of the original data will be encrypted by a single encryption algorithm once, and it will be transmitted only once. The proposed MVMP mechanism is compared with existing mechanisms, in particular, the secret sharing mechanism using performance criteria including redundancy level, self-healing capability, and security.