Energy aware and secure routing for hierarchical cluster through trust evaluation

Abstract

With the rapid growth of technology advancement in wireless communication have resulted in interconnection of large number of devices covering wide range of application services. Wireless sensor network (WSN) have become popular and provide various benefits, including low-power smart computation, compact size, self organizing and ability to route via routing protocols. WSN covers a wide range of application services, including home automation, smart cities, fire detection, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), and object tacking. Sensor nodes are tiny, battery operated, and suffer from fundamental restrictions such as available bandwidth, memory space, power restrictions, and limited resources. Due to their communication characteristics and working environment, WSN faces energy optimization and secure data communication challenges to increase network lifetime and defend against malicious nodes. To overcome energy scarcity and consumption issues, clustering methods have proven smart and effective approaches to reduce energy consumption and extend network life. Low energy adaptive clustering hierarchy (LEACH), well-known clustering method, enhances energy efficiency by selecting cluster head (CH) on a rotation basis by employing random integer technique. To extend network stability period, extensions of LEACH was proposed. LEACH and its extensions mainly focus on optimal selection of CH and fail to concentrate on secure communication. Integration of blockchain and real-time message content validation (RMVC) in LEACH was modelled to detect malicious node through secure hash algorithm. However, existing scheme had complex cryptographic functions and higher computation overhead. In this paper, we present energy aware and secure routing (EASR) for hierarchical cluster based WSN. Existing LEACH is modified and an improved threshold value is adapted to select secure optimal CH and trust based routing model which combines direct and indirect trust opinion values to resist routing attacks for establishing trustworthy and reliable routes towards base station.