A Secure Energy Aware Meta-Heuristic Routing Protocol (SEAMHR) for sustainable IoT-Wireless Sensor Network (WSN)

Abstract

WSNs (Wireless Sensor Networks) have attracted interest because of ease of maintenance, scalability, and self-configurations. WSNs encompass many tiny SNs (sensor nodes) or sensors that are capable of participating in IoTs (Internet of Things). WSNs are used to monitor and record environmental conditions or changes. The evolution of DLTs (Deep learning techniques) and next-generation communication networks have addressed sustainable developments in multiple domains including healthcare, agriculture, and transportation. Development of WSNs face challenges in sensor designs, communication latencies, and security. SNs have limitations in data storages, processing powers, energy managements, transmissions and security. Data is vulnerable when SNs are compromised. This work proposes SEAMHR (Secure Energy-Aware Meta-Heuristic Routing) protocol for WSNs with the aim to improve security and network performance. The proposed protocol initially uses Meta-Heuristic analysis based on MEHO (Mutation Elephant Herding Optimization) to achieve a trustworthy and intelligent learning. The protocol uses hop counts, link integrity parameters, and aggregated residual energy to learn the routing decisions. Counter Mode Cryptography method is also used by the protocol using AEs (Auto encoders) called CTR-AEDL for securing data with encryptions and authenticates inter-routing to increase the algorithm's security. Improved and secure data transmissions are achieved by CTR-AEDL which generates keys using five essential components: secret keys, counter bits, data packets, classifier's weights and biases. The encryption method generates four-factor unique patterns for counter blocks, and cipher texts are generated by softmax operations between data packets and counter blocks. The actual data packets are obtained using decryptions with the same key. In addition, traffic explorations reduce link failures and network disconnections as part of route maintenance strategies. When compared to previous methods, the suggested SEAMHR protocol improves energy consumptions, network throughputs, PDRs (packet drop ratios), network/computational overhead, and identification of faulty routes in low-powered SNs which is compared with Secure and Energy-Aware Heuristic based Routing (SEHR), Sec Trust-RPL and Heuristic-Based Energy-Efficient Routing (HBEER).