Secured and Optimized AODV for Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Similar to conventional wireless networks, WSNs are based on multi hop routing to ensure connectivity and data forwarding which makes the routing service a challenging task due to the nature of sensors usually limited in memory, battery and computing capacities as well as the nature of the environment which is hostile and unpredictable making the routing protocols developed for conventional wireless network useless for WSNs without modifications and adaptations for the new context of WSNs. Thus in this paper we present an optimized version of AODV protocol for WSNs which takes into consideration the traffic pattern of WSNs and sensors' constraints. In the proposed protocol we affect the task of route discovery to the base station which periodically informs sensors about its location instead of letting this task to sensors which consumes the network resources due to the broadcasting nature of the route discovery. We have also proposed a key distribution scheme destined to establish a symmetric encrypting key between each sensor and the base station, the proposed key management scheme uses the underlying routing requests to execute handshakes and key update which have greatly saved the network resources and ensured a good threshold of security.