Secure geographic forwarding protocols for wireless sensor networks

The Advancement of the micro-electro-mechanical system (MEMS), wireless communication, and low-power electronic devices has facilitated the development of multipurpose and low-cost sensor devices. These devices are deployed in a target region, in hundreds or thousands with an objective of gathering information and transmit that information through multi-hops, to remote users/computer using a special pattern of communication known as routing protocol. Indeed, the overall performance of WSNs’ routing protocol is significantly influenced by the deployment of security techniques in the routing procedures that intend to prevent routing attacks. Although, WSNs have been used in many sensitive applications, the development of reliable security techniques to safeguard the transmitted information are still a great challenge and unable to adapt to the resource constraints of the sensor nodes. This is because the existing security tools such as cryptographic and key management schemes are too expensive in term of computational resources to be directly integrated into sensor nodes. Furthermore, the multi-hop communication and the absence of centralized administration increase WSN vulnerabilities against routing failures and complexities. For this reasons, inefficient secure routing protocols would cause extreme performance degradation when subjected to attackers in the communication processes. In order to enhance network performance and improve the ability of secure routing protocol on dealing with the existence of attackers, this research work proposes a Bound collection Geographic Forwarding (BCGF) protocol designed for WSN. The BCGF helps in reducing the participation of an attacker in the communication process as well as prevent retransmission of control packets. Thereafter, extensive simulation experiments are carried out to evaluate the performance of the proposed BCGF compared to the existing secure implicit geographic routing protocols. The results demonstrate that the BCGF improve network performance when the protocol is subjected to no attacker and increases packet delivery to the destination when a single attacker is of concerned. Furthermore, the Secure Region-based Geographic Routing (SRBGR) protocol is proposed to increase the number of legitimate responders in the communication process when the number of Sybil virtual nodes increase in the forwarding allocated area, in which the number of attacker selection is high and packet drop is very common. SBRGR proposes an extension of forwarding area beyond allocated sextant for security purposes. Extensive simulation experiments show that the proposed protocol achieves a higher performance in minimizing attacker selection contrary to the other secure protocols. Moreover, to build a trust communication between neighbouring nodes, during the routing processes and prevent malicious nodes in dropping packets, a Light-weight Trust-based Scheme (LTBS) is proposed. LTBS allows each node to monitor and determine the trustworthiness of its neighbours based on packet forwarding acknowledge. LTBS encourages cooperation between nodes while thwarts misbehaving nodes in capturing the communication and create inconsistency in packet forwarding process. Substantial simulations have been conducted to evaluate the proposed scheme. The results show that the scheme achieves better performance in reducing the attackers in their different magnitudes and severities. Fortunately, results of the simulation show that the proposed secure routing protocols provide enhancements in network performance and security. It reduces the communication overheads, end-to-end delay while improving the packet delivery to the destination when no attackers are presented in the communication link. Also, it detects the routing attacks such as black hole and Sybil nodes by minimizing their selection in routing processes in contrary to the existing secure routing protocols.

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