A two-tier energy-efficient secure routing protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

Recently, Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have been deployed into a variety of applications including homeland security, military systems, and health care. Sensor nodes deployed in such networks are subject to several attacks such as sinkhole and select forwarding. Therefore, developing secure and energy-efficient routing protocols to protect WSNs against these attacks while efficiently utilize the energy of the deployed nodes has become imperative. Several routing protocols have been proposed in the literature. However, most of these protocols forward packets based on information collected from neighbor nodes. This allows a malicious sensor node to deceive its neighbor to forward their packets through it. This makes the network's nodes vulnerable to various types of attacks such as sinkhole, spoofing, and select forwarding attacks. Therefore, this paper proposes a two-tier energy-efficient secure routing protocol for WSNs in which each sensor node forwards its packets based on its own information. Thus it cannot be deceived by any other sensor node. Simulation results indicate clearly that, the performance of the proposed protocol outperforms that of both the Path Energy Weight and the minimum hop protocols under several attacks such as sinkhole and spoofing or Sybil attacks. In addition, the proposed protocol exhibits a grateful performance under attack-free conditions and evenly distributes the network loads among the deployed nodes to prolong the network life time.