A Method to Select Next Hop Node for Improving Energy Efficiency in LEAP-Based WSNs

Abstract

In wireless sensor networks, sensors have stringent energy and computation requirements as they must function unattended. The sensor nodes can be compromised by adversaries who attack network layers such as in sinkhole attacks. Sinkhole attacks have the goal of changing routing paths and snatching data surrounding the compromised node. A localized encryption and authentication protocol (LEAP) observes different types of messages exchanged between sensors that have different security requirements to cope with the attack. Even though this original method excels in security communication using multiple keys, the data is transmitted without optimal selection of the next nodes. In this paper, our proposed method selects the optimal next node based on a fuzzy logic system. We evaluated the energy and security performances of our method against sinkhole attack. Our focus is to improve energy efficiency and maintain the same security level as compared to LEAP. Experimental results indicated that the proposed method saves up to 5 % of the energy while maintaining the security level against the attack as compared to LEAP.