Secured Clustering in Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks are being increasingly used in a wide variety of applications such as the environment, nuclear power plants, military and transportation, to name a few. These sensors are fragile devices, with minimal energy, storage and computational resources. The phenomenon that is sensed is relayed to a powerful base station for further analysis. A key issue in the design of communication protocols for wireless sensor networks is energy conservation. Another important criterion for sensor networks is security. This is particularly important in military applications and national infrastructure such as power plants and transportation systems. As far as we are aware, no protocols have been proposed for energy efficient secure communications. In previous work both security and energy efficiency have been considered separately in the design of protocols for sensor networks. In this thesis we propose a secure energy efficient communication protocol for wireless sensor networks. A clustered protocol based on "A key-management scheme for distributed sensor networks" proposed by V.D. Gligor is developed and simulated in this thesis. To further improve energy efficiency we apply the concept of a force to improve the coverage of the sensor nodes. The properties of our proposed algorithm have been analyzed. We propose in this thesis a secure scheme with clustering, a balanced secure scheme with clustering and finally a balanced clustered secure scheme after the application of force. Results show that the proposed balanced clustered secure scheme after the application of force provides the best energy efficiency as well as security. The secure scheme with no clustering gave the worst results.