A Secure Cluster-Based Multipath Routing Protocol for WMSNs

Islam T Almalkawi,Manel Guerrero Zapata,Jamal N Al-Karaki

doi:10.3390/s110404401

Abstract

The new characteristics of Wireless Multimedia Sensor Network (WMSN) and its design issues brought by handling different traffic classes of multimedia content (video streams, audio, and still images) as well as scalar data over the network, make the proposed routing protocols for typical WSNs not directly applicable for WMSNs. Handling real-time multimedia data requires both energy efficiency and QoS assurance in order to ensure efficient utility of different capabilities of sensor resources and correct delivery of collected information. In this paper, we propose a Secure Cluster-based Multipath Routing protocol for WMSNs, SCMR, to satisfy the requirements of delivering different data types and support high data rate multimedia traffic. SCMR exploits the hierarchical structure of powerful cluster heads and the optimized multiple paths to support timeliness and reliable high data rate multimedia communication with minimum energy dissipation. Also, we present a light-weight distributed security mechanism of key management in order to secure the communication between sensor nodes and protect the network against different types of attacks. Performance evaluation from simulation results demonstrates a significant performance improvement comparing with existing protocols (which do not even provide any kind of security feature) in terms of average end-to-end delay, network throughput, packet delivery ratio, and energy consumption.

Highlights

We introduce briefly two major issues of designing Wireless Multimedia Sensor Network (WMSN), which are routing and security in Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks (WMSNs), examine their main challenges, and present how our novel proposed solutions address them
In this subsection we examine the security protection achieved by our proposed security scheme against some general security threats in sensor networks, and its performance in terms of memory requirement and scalability: Defenses from outsider attacks: Most of the outsider attacks against WMSN routing protocols can be prevented by providing confidentiality using the shared security keys
We proposed a Secure Cluster-based Multipath Routing protocol (SCMR) for WMSNs designed to handle the additional requirements of reliable data delivering of different traffic classes and provide load balancing by using multipath routing

Summary

Introduction

The proposed routing protocol aims to satisfy the following design goals: (1) supporting different traffic classes of different delay and bandwidth requirements by choosing the suitable path for each data type, (2) maintaining minimum end-to-end delay suitable for real-time and non-real-time data packets to meet their playout deadlines, (3) achieving high throughput and packet delivery ratio by selecting the paths with better link quality and avoiding collisions and interferences, (4) saving energy at sensor nodes by moving the multimedia processing complexity as well as the aggregation process to the cluster heads’ side, along with preventing path loops and path cycles in establishing the routes, (5) providing load balancing and reliable data delivery by using multi-path routing protocol and two-level QoS-aware scheduling, and (6) supporting a secure communication among the nodes by implementing a light-weight distributed security scheme for key management as explained in the following subsection.

Related Work

Conclusions