Security and Dependability Enhancement of Wireless Sensor Networks with Multipath Routing Utilizing the Connectedness of Joint Nodes

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) consist of wireless nodes, which have relaying functions without the fixed communication infrastructures such as the base station. With WSNs, multiple paths are used for alternate paths against route breaks, ensuring bandwidth and security. However, the downside is that multiple paths have an elevated control packet count. The method of finding multiple paths is referred to as the multipath routing method. DART is a routing method that generates fewer control packets, however it is a single path routing method and cannot be applied directly to constructing multiple paths. In this paper, we propose a new multipath routing method to reduce the number of joint nodes on multiple paths with fewer control packets while managing the maximum degree of connectedness, defined by the number of paths connecting to a node, on the joint nodes. In addition, our proposed method improves upon the routing tables of DART. The proposed method introduces two values: joint count and connectedness. The former is for counting the number of joint nodes on a path and the latter is for finding the maximum degree of path connectedness on the joint nodes. Our method improves resilience against node capture attacks without the degradation of packet delivery ratios. We have implemented our proposed method on a network simulator, Qual Net, to confirm its effectiveness. We conducted simulation experiments to investigate characteristics such as the resilience against node capture attacks and the received data ratio on the destination nodes. In the simulation experiments, we compared three configurations: our proposed method with full specification, our proposed method without connectedness, and finally our proposed method without connectedness and joint count. The results were that our proposed method improved the resilience against node capture attacks without significant degradation of the data delivery ratio.