MSR: A multipath secure reliable routing protocol for WSNs

Abstract

Many routing protocols have been proposed for wireless sensor networks (WSNs). However, only few of them addressed secure routing. This work contributes in solving secure and reliable routing problems by presenting a secure and reliable multipath routing protocol (MSR) for WSNs. MSR consists of three key components: on-demand multipath routing, enhanced passive acknowledgment, and erasure coding. On-demand routing enhances the security and reliability of the routing protocol while enhanced passive acknowledgment is used to both enhance the security of the protocol and reduce its overhead. In addition, erasure coding is further used to increase the protocol security and reliability. We present the details of the protocol along with a study of major security attacks in WSNs and determines the level of MSR's resistance against these attacks. The evaluation of the proposed protocol using the NS2 simulator shows that it can significantly enhance the security of WSNs under different attacker models.