Secure Data Transmission in WSN: An Overview

Abstract

Building a secure routing protocol in WSN is not trivial process. Thee are two main types of security attacks against WSNs: active and passive. WSN as a new category of computer-based computing platforms and network structures is showing new applications in different areas such as environmental monitoring, health care and military applications. Although there are a lot of secure data transmission schemes designed for data aggregation and transmission over a network, the limited resources and the complex environment make it invisible to be used with WSNs. Furthermore, secure data transmission is a big challenging issue in WSNs especially for the application that uses image as its main data such as military applications. This problem is mainly related to the limited resources and data processing capabilities. This chapter introduces a secure data processing and transmission schema in WSN. The chapter reviewed and critically discussed the most prominent secure clustering routing algorithms that have been developed for WSNs. Then, we explained the guidelines and the steps towards building a simple solution for securing the dynamic cluster network while consuming as little energy as possible and is adapted to a low computing power. Moreover, four phased towards building a secure clustering algorithm for WSN are proposed. These phases are secure cluster head selection, secure cluster formation, secure data aggregation by the cluster head from its cluster nodes, and secure data routing to the base station. Also, the chapter proposes and applies an evaluation criteria for the existing secure clustering algorithms.