A selective encryption and energy efficient clustering scheme for video streaming in wireless sensor networks

Abstract

The past few years have witnessed increased interest in the potential use of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) in applications such as battlefield assistance, adversary intrusion detection, distributed signal processing, etc. In these applications, multimedia semantic information and video content are extremely sensitive to malicious attacks, including eavesdropping/intercepting of ongoing traffic, and manipulating/counterfeiting of the existing media flows. From a security standpoint, it is very important to transmit authentic and accurate data to surrounding sensor nodes and to the sink. However, securing sensor networks poses unique challenges because these tiny wireless devices are deployed in large numbers, usually in unattended environments, and are severely limited in their capabilities and resources like power, computational capacity, and memory. In this work, a secure and selective encryption framework is proposed so as to optimize network lifetime and video distortion for an energy constrained wireless video sensor network (WVSN).