A Path Blind Approach to Secure Geographical Routing in Energy Aware Wireless Sensor Networks

During last decade the demand of wireless sensor network has increased drastically due to its self-organizing and efficient data collection nature from the hazardous or unattended environments. In this field of sensor network, geographical node placement is widely adopted in various applications mainly for military applications where network lifetime and security remains a challenging research issue. In this work, we developed a novel approach geographical sensor networks where energy aware routing and location privacy schemes are introduced. First of all, we develop a routing scheme where the entire network is divided into multiple grids and the data transmitter node identifies the neighbouring grid where grid head is selected based on the maximum energy level and the distance from the sink node. During transmission, a routing table is maintained which contains information about source and next hop node such as Node ID, Current grid ID, Neighbouring Node ID, Neighbour Grid ID, Distance, Energy Level of Node 1, Energy Level of Node 2 and the data for transmission. Out path blind approach enables transmission to happen without the knowledge of entire communication path in the beginning and till the last hop. In order to improve the location privacy and security, we apply SHA-256 algorithm for hash function generation for each node and grid ID. Furthermore, the data is encrypted using hybrid AES-DES algorithm for better security provisioning. The performance of proposed approach is measured into network throughput, network lifetime, and energy consumption for varied data rates. The performance of proposed approach shows better throughput for the high data rates and achieves better network lifetime for the low data rates.