Energy efficient secure data collection with path-constrained mobile sink in duty-cycled unattended wireless sensor network

Abstract

This paper addresses the problem of secure data transmission and balanced energy consumption in an unattended wireless sensor network (UWSN) comprising of multiple static source nodes and a mobile sink in the presence of adversaries. The proposed system comprises of three phases: the identification of data collection points (convex nodes), path planning by the mobile sink, and secure data transmission. An energy-aware convex hull algorithm is used for the identification of data collection points for data transmission to the mobile sink. Data transmission from sensor nodes to the nearest data collection point is performed using multihop communication and from sensor nodes to the mobile sink in a single hop. Data are securely transmitted through an elliptic curve cryptography based ElGamal scheme for message authentication. A data packet is associated with a digital signature. The variation in a digital signature and threshold energy obtained using support vector machine is used to determine the presence of malicious nodes in the network. The performance of the proposed system is evaluated using Cooja simulator by Contiki for various node counts under a static sink and mobile sink, with different threat scenarios. The results indicate that the proposed system is resilient against threats and provides satisfactory performance