A Secure and Efficient Method to Protect Communications and Energy Consumption in IoT Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

The rapid growth of technology has resulted in the deployment of a large number of interconnected devices, resulting in a wide range of new societal services. Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are a promising technology which is faced with the challenges of operating a large number of sensor nodes, information gathering, data transmission, and providing a means to act in different scenarios such as monitoring, surveillance, forest fire detection, and many others from the civil to military spectrum. The deployment scenario, the nature of the sensor-equipped nodes, and their communication methods make this architecture extremely vulnerable to attacks, tampering, and manipulation than conventional networks. Therefore, an optimal solution to ensure security in such networks which captures the major constraints of the network in terms of energy utilization, secured data transmission, bandwidth, and memory fingerprint to process data is required. This work proposes a fast, reliable, and secure method of key distribution and management that can be used to ensure the integrity of wireless sensor networks’ communications. Moreover, with regards to efficient energy utilization, an improvement of the Low Energy Adaptive Clustering Hierarchy (LEACH) algorithm (a cluster routing protocol that is mainly used in WSN) has been proposed to enhance the networks’ energy efficiency, simplicity, and load-balancing features. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a combination of a distributed key exchange and management methods based on elliptic curve cryptography to ensure security of node communication and an improved routing protocol based on the LEACH protocol to demonstrate better performance in parameters such as network lifespan, dead nodes, and energy consumption.