Lightweight secure and reliable authentication for cluster based WSN

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are distributed all over the globe and are widely used for physical collection of data sensed in its surrounding. Tiny, affordable, constrained battery power, information processing capability devices called sensor nodes, plays a crucial role in agriculture, army, industry, intelligent grid, health care, critical infrastructure, etc. WSNs are often exposed to types of attacks. Once a sensor is affected by adversaries, the sensor's data materials become non- protective and intercepted by the enemy. In this paper we propose a lightweight polynomial secrete key (LWPK) sharing mechanism for secure hierarchal cluster based communication. LWPK is built on elliptical curve cryptography by exchanging symmetric keys to secure data transmission. Set of tests is carried on discrete event simulation tool and simulation results achieves better performance in terms of communication overhead, packet delivery ratio, end to end delay and network lifetime.