A Dual-Sink Secure Routing Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

The recent advancements in electronics and communications technology have enabled the extensive deployment of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) into a variety of areas including homeland security, military systems, industrial, and health care. WSNs are typically deployed in unattended, hostile and harsh environment which makes them subject to several attacks such as sinkhole, spoofing or Sybil, wormhole, and selective forwarding. Therefore, developing secure, load-balanced and scalable routing protocols for WSNs has become imperative. In the recent literature, most of the routing protocols take the routing decision based on information collected from neighboring nodes. However, this allows a malicious sensor node to deceive its neighbors and forward their packets through it. This makes the network's nodes vulnerable to various attacks. Therefore, in this paper we propose a Dual Sink Secure Routing Protocol (DSSRP) for WSNs. The DSSRP is a scalable protocol for secure routing in which, the routing decision of a node is based on its own information. Thus it cannot be deceived by any other sensor node. Extensive simulation results indicate clearly that, the DSSRP protocol achieves very high confidentiality, integrity, authentication, and non-repetition with a very low overhead. In addition, the proposed protocol exhibits a grateful performance under attack-free conditions by evenly distributing the network load among the deployed nodes thus extending the network lifetime.