Enhanced routing protocol for graceful degradation in wireless sensor networks during attacks

Abstract

With the deployment of Sensor networks gaining some popularity, researchers are now focusing on solving the issues concerned with making sensor networks more feasible and viable. As Sensor networks have various constraints in terms of limited resources available, not many researchers come forward to work on the security issues for this stringent environment. Lately, it has been realized that these sensor networks which have found application in many trivial situations need to be secured. And though this security comes with the expense of some portion of its resources, it has been proved to be essential for the survival of sensor networks to serve their purpose. LEACH (Low Energy Adaptive Clustering Hierarchy) is an architecture for remote microsensor networks that combine the concept of energy efficient cluster based routing and media access, together with application specific data aggregation to achieve good performance in terms of system lifetime and latency. This approach has been proved to improve system lifetime by an order of magnitude, compared to general purpose approach when the node energy is limited. Though LEACH has several good qualities which have been widely accepted for various researches in the field of WSN, it has a hitch attached to it like any other WSN when we consider security factor. As control is distributed through out the network of making self organization possible, the cluster head nodes play an important role in the network. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)