Wireless Sensor Network Nodes: Security and Deployment in the Niger-Delta Oil and Gas Sector

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks (WSN) is tending towards becoming a complete solution in communication protocols, embedded systems and low-power implementations. However, the resource constraints which includes, limited communication range, limited energy, limited computing power, limited bandwidth and the fear of intruders have limited the WSN applications. Since lightweight computational nodes that are currently being used in WSN pose particular challenge for many security applications, the whole research therefore, is the investigation of new security techniques and appropriate implementation for WSN nodes, including various trade-offs such as implementation complexity, power dissipation, security flexibility and scalability. The goal of this research is to develop a network that has efficient and flexible key distribution scheme secured enough to prevent algorithmic complexity and denial of service attacks as well as the network able to conserve energy. A review of previous research to date in the area of security for WSNs was carried out and proposals are made based on security schemes that gather data in an energy-efficient mechanism through secured pre-allocation of keys, faster clustering routing algorithm and dynamic based rekeying implementation.