Design of a secure and efficient authentication protocol for real-time accesses of multiple users in PIoT-oriented multi-gateway WSNs

The wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are the core collecting network of the power internet of things (PIoT). With the development of PIoT, higher standards of timeliness and security are required for the data collection work done by the WSNs. In recent years, researchers have proposed a series of lightweight security protocols for identity authentication and data access in resource-constrained systems such as WSNs. But on one hand, these lightweight security protocols do not take into account of needs of the simultaneous access by multiple users, thus will not meet the requirements of PIoT; on the other hand, it does not take the entire process of remote accessing into account when calculating communication efficiency, and cannot fully reflect the advantage in efficiency. Therefore, this paper proposes a PIoT-oriented WSNs communication model based on PIoT's characteristics such as multi-user, and higher standard of timeliness and security. It also designs a new identity authentication protocol for multi-gateway WSNs. Through the informal security analysis, the protocol proposed in this paper is proved to be more secure and efficient comparing to other multi-user access protocols. (C) 2022 Published by Elsevier Ltd.