H-SPREAD: A hybrid multipath scheme for secure and reliable data collection in wireless sensor networks

Communication security and reliability are two important issues in any network. A typical communication task in a wireless sensor network is for every sensor node to sense its local environment, and upon request, send data of interest back to a base station (BS). In this paper, a hybrid multipath scheme (H-SPREAD) to improve both the security and reliability of this task in a potentially hostile and unreliable wireless sensor network is proposed. The new scheme is based on a distributed N-to-1 multipath discovery protocol, which is able to find multiple node-disjoint paths from every sensor node to the BS simultaneously in one route discovery process. Then, a hybrid multipath data collection scheme is proposed. On the one hand, end-to-end multipath data dispersion, combined with secret sharing, enhances the security of the end-to-end data delivery in the sense that the compromise of a small number of paths will not result in the compromise of a data message in the face of adversarial nodes. On the other hand, in the face of unreliable wireless links and/or sensor nodes, alternate path routing available at each sensor node improves the reliability of each packet transmission significantly. The extensive simulation results show that the hybrid multipath scheme is very efficient in improving both the security and reliability of the data collection service seamlessly.