Design and performance assessment of energy aware security enhancing strategy for PEGASIS protocol for MWSN

Abstract

Due to wide variety of applications, Wireless Sensor Networks have been extensively used and many researchers are engaged in research in this area including Mobile Wireless Sensor Networks (MWSN). The major issues in use of MWSN however are energy consumption, security, scalability, robustness etc. It is generally observed that clustered WSN networks using hierarchical routing protocols, significantly reduce the overall energy consumed. However, some of these protocols do not address the security issues related to different attacks. A security enhanced Sec-LEACH protocol results in higher security using random key predistribution and μTESLA. In this paper, an approach has been implemented to arrive at an energy aware security enhancing strategy for Power-Efficient GAthering in Sensor Information Systems (PEGASIS) and referred to as Sec-PEGASIS protocol. The performance evaluations have been done for three important metrics namely residual energy, packet delivery ratio and routing overheads. The performance comparison has been done with respect to LEACH, Sec-LEACH and normal PEGASIS protocol for different rounds of data collection. It is seen that energy aware security enhancing strategy proposed in this paper provides higher level of security, retaining the energy efficiency feature of PEGASIS protocol unaltered.