A multi order key sharing and dual channel based secure routing for WSN

Abstract

Growth in the remote monitoring and automation in maintenance for all fields of industrialization in motivating the sensor researches more and more. The major challenge faced by the practitioners and the researchers are to keep up with the advancements of the data accumulation and analytic demands as the resource capabilities of sensors, especially the wireless sensors, are limited in terms of battery or energy, processing capacity and security. A number of wireless sensor networks collect mission critical and sensitive data for the processing. Also, the feedback systems through the same sensor networks are also important and sensitive. Due to the fragile structure of the network, often it is vulnerable to the attacks. A number of studies have demonstrated the types of the attacks and their effect on the network. The identified attacks are highly versatile in nature, thus leaving a less scope for a single solution to prevent the attacks. Numerous research attempts are presented till date to find the most effective method of securing the wireless sensor networks. Nevertheless, all these solutions are criticised for neglecting one or the other possible threats. It is been observed that, the majority of the attacks happen during the data transmission time and the new node registration time. The transmissions of the data in the network are managed by the routing protocols and the registrations of the new node into the network are managed by node registration algorithms or strategies. Thus, these two are the highly vulnerable situations for any wireless sensor networks life cycle. Hence, this work addresses two unique solutions for these two situations, which is again mutually exclusive. The major outcome of this work is to secure the routing using randomize channels and node registration process using multi order key in order to avoid majority of the attacks on the network. Also, during the transmission or the routing of the data through the network channels, it is often recommended that the data must be encrypted. Nonetheless, the encryption and decryption of the data is a significant load on the limited processing capabilities of the sensor nodes. Thus this highly recommended process is habitually ignored, compromising the threats. Yet another outcome from this work, is to separate the header and the content part of the data packets to reduce the network loads.