Enhancing S-LEACH security for wireless sensor networks
Mona El Saadawy, Eman Shaaban · 2012
Developing effective security solutions for wireless sensor networks (WSN) are not easy due to limited resources of WSNs and the hazardous nature of wireless medium. The implementation of encryption/decryption algorithms which are the most essential part of the secure communication can be very intricate in WSNs since they incorporate routines that having very complex and intense computing procedures. A secure clustering protocol that achieves the desired security goals while keeping an acceptable level of energy consumption is a challenging problem in wireless sensor network. LEACH (Low-Energy Adaptive Clustering Hierarchy) protocol is a basic clustering-based routing protocol for WSNs. S-LEACH is the first modified version of LEACH with cryptographic protection against outsider attacks. This paper proposes MS-LEACH to enhance the security of S-LEACH by providing data confidentiality and node to cluster head (CH) authentication using pairwise keys shared between CHs and their cluster members. The security analysis of proposed MS-LEACH shows that it has efficient security properties and achieves all WSN security goals compared to the existing secured solutions of LEACH protocol. A simulation based performance evaluation of MS-LEACH demonstrates the effectiveness of proposed MS-LEACH protocol and shows that the protocol achieves the desired security goals and outperforms other protocols in terms of energy consumption, network lifetime, network throughput and normalized routing load.