ISCP: An Instantaneous and Secure Clustering Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

A Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is an Ad-hoc network populated by small hand-held commodity devices, running on batteries called stations or sensors. These sensors are deployed in an area called a perception zone in order to study one or more phenomena. Generally, the perception zone is an area where access is almost impossible for humans. Given the absence of a previously defined infrastructure, deployed sensors need to organize themselves to ensure not only their connectivity but also effective management of their residual energy. This residual energy management is more important since we know that communications over long distances are always very energy-consuming for sensors, which most often do not have a secondary source of energy. Multi-hop communication is generally used to connect sensors in order to ensure efficient use of their energy. This being the case, multi-hop communication can be established by partitioning the network into clusters. In order to avoid malicious intrusions, all operations involved must be done in a secure manner. In this paper, we propose a secure clustering protocol which connects all the sensors of the network.