Multi-Tree-Based Avoidance Multicast Routing for Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Multi-path avoidance routing for wireless sensor networks (WSNs) is a secure routing paradigm against adversaries with unbounded computational power. The key idea of avoidance routing is to encode a message into several pieces by the XOR coding, and each piece is routed via different paths. Then, an adversary cannot obtain the original message unless she eavesdrops on all message pieces from all the paths. In this paper, we extend such an approach into secure multicast routing, which is a one-to-many communication primitive. To this end, we propose the multi-tree-based avoidance multicast routing protocol (AMRP) for WSNs, in which a set of adversary disjoint trees is discovered, i.e., a set of multicast trees with no common adversaries. When a set of multicast trees is adversary disjoint, no adversary can eavesdrop on all message pieces to recover the original message. In addition, optimized AMRP (OAMRP) is proposed in order to reduce the control overhead of AMRP, where additional multicast trees are used for only a subset of destination nodes with no single safe tree. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed protocols achieve higher secure delivery rates than a simple extension of the existing unicast avoidance routing protocol.