S-FEAR: Secure-fuzzy energy aware routing protocol for wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Secure routing services in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are essential, especially in mission critical fields such as the military and in medical applications. Additionally, they play a vital role in the current and future Internet of Things (IoT) services. Lightness and efficiency of a routing protocol are not the only requirements that guarantee success; security assurance also needs to be enforced. This paper proposes a Secure-Fuzzy Energy Aware Routing Protocol (S-FEAR) for WSNs. S-FEAR applies a security model to an existing energy efficient FEAR protocol. As part of this research, the S-FEAR protocol has been analyzed in terms of the communication and processing costs associated with building and applying this model, regardless of the security techniques used. Moreover, the Qualnet network simulator was used to implement both FEAR and S-FEAR after carefully selecting the following security techniques to achieve both authentication and data integrity: the Cipher Block Chaining-Message Authentication Code (CBC-MAC) and the Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA). The performance of both protocols was assessed in terms of complexity and energy consumption. The results reveal that achieving authentication and data integrity successfully excluded all attackers from the network topology regardless of the percentage of attackers. Consequently, the constructed topology is secure and thus, safe data transmission over the network is ensured. Simulation results show that using CBC-MAC for example, costs 0.00064% of network energy while ECDSA costs about 0.0091%. On the other hand, attacks cost the network about 4.7 times the cost of applying these techniques.