Title: Design and simulation on data-forwarding security in sensor networks

Authors: Men Long, Chwan-Hwa 'John' Wu

Addresses: Communications Technology Lab, Intel Corporation, 2111 NE 25th Ave., Hillsboro, OR 97124, USA. ' Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, Auburn University, 200 Broun Hall, AL 36849-5201, USA

Abstract: Wireless sensor networks are the emerging information technology for monitoring equipment and ambient conditions of production lines in modern factories. A salient feature of wireless sensor networks is that nodes can relay sensing data to a factory data centre in a multihop fashion. Existing security solutions to sensor networks focus on hop-by-hop encryption and message authentication, as the wireless medium is of an open nature. From an end-to-end perspective, a challenging security problem arises when computer hackers compromise some nodes in a network and these adversarial nodes modify or drop data packets destined to a data centre. In this paper, we propose the Secure Quasimultipath Forwarding (SQF) scheme with the novel idea of dynamic en route retransmission upon encountering adversary nodes. Modelling techniques are employed to study the impact of the data-forwarding security design on packet delivery latency and energy consumption. The simulation results demonstrate that SQF circumvents adversaries with a several-fold reduction in sensor node energy consumption, compared to the existing multipath routing method.

Keywords: industrial security; wireless sensor networks; WSNs; routing; secure quasimultipath forwarding; SQF; reliability; network security; modelling; packet delivery latency; energy consumption.

DOI: 10.1504/IJICS.2009.028812

International Journal of Information and Computer Security, 2009 Vol.3 No.2, pp.173 - 194

Published online: 03 Oct 2009 *

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