Energy efficient data dissemination with effective authentication in wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) is a collection of tiny sensor nodes that have been densely deployed in a geographical area to monitor by measuring various physical parameters pertaining to that area. Data dissemination is a service provided for Wireless Sensor Networks to update the deployed sensor nodes online by using over air programming through radio communication. Since centralized data dissemination approaches suffer from limitations of single point of failure, lack of scalability and they have been replaced by distributed approaches. In distributed data dissemination, the dissemination privileges are delegated by the network owners to the network users to disseminate the data items on their behalf. Most of the existing data dissemination protocols employ gossiping and trickle algorithm to deliver the data items to the sensor nodes. Since gossiping makes the network to transmit same data items by multiple sensor nodes for multiple times to their neighbors until they reach the required nodes which are in need of them. These multiple transmissions result in a problem called Redundant Broadcast Storm Problem (RBSP). RBSP results in too many senders problem and this leads to more consumption of energy in the network. In distributed data dissemination, since there is no centralized control, an attacker or an intruder node can enter the sensing domain to eavesdrop the data and forge them later. The eavesdrop attack results in deletion of important network parameters of the nodes. Later the attack ensures that the nodes are rebooted with malicious code so that major portion of the network is compromised. Moreover, any dissemination protocol which uses trickle algorithm is vulnerable to Denial of Service Attack (DoS) during data dissemination. Due to the nature of distributed environment, it is necessary to provide effective privacy preserving and access control mechanisms. newline