Secure cell relay routing protocol for sensor networks

Past researches on sensor network routing have been focused on efficiency and effectiveness of data dissemination. Few of them consider security issues during the design time of routing protocols. Security is very important for many sensor network applications. Studies and experiences have shown that considering security during design time is the best way to provide security for sensor network routing. In this paper, we propose an efficient key management scheme and a novel secure routing protocol-Secure cell relay (SCR) for sensor networks. We also present an effective key setup scheme for sensor nodes deployed in the later stage. We analyze the security of SCR under various attacks and show that SCR is very effective in defending against several sophisticated attacks, including selective forwarding, sinkhole, wormhole, Sybil, hello flooding, and clone attacks. SCR is an energy-efficient routing protocol with acceptable security overhead. Our simulations demonstrate that with all the security primitives, SCR still has lower energy consumption and higher delivery ratio than a popular routing protocol-directed diffusion. Copyright (c) 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.