SEEM: Secure and energy-efficient multipath routing protocol for wireless sensor networks

Abstract

A Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is a collection of wireless sensor nodes forming a temporary network without the aid of any established infrastructure or centralized administration. In such an environment, due to the limited range of each node’s wireless transmissions, it may be necessary for one sensor node to ask for the aid of other sensor nodes in forwarding a packet to its destination, usually the base station. One important issue when designing wireless sensor network is the routing protocol that makes the best use of the severely limited resource presented by WSN, especially the energy limitation. Another import factor required attention from researchers is providing as much security to the application as possible. The proposed routing protocols in the literature focus either only on increasing lifetime of network or only on addressing security issues while consuming much power. None of them combine solutions to the two challenges. In this paper, we propose a new routing protocol called SEEM: Secure and Energy-Efficient multipath Routing protocol. SEEM uses multipath alternately as the path for communicating between two nodes thus prolongs the lifetime of the network. On the other hand, SEEM is effectively resistive to some specific attacks that have the character of pulling all traffic through the malicious nodes by advertising an attractive route to the destination. The performance of our protocol is compared to the Directed Diffusion protocol. Simulation results show that our protocol surpasses the Directed Diffusion protocol in terms of throughput, control overhead and network lifetime.