Securing Sensor Networks Using A Novel Multi-Channel Architecture

In many applications of sensor networks, security is a very important issue. To be resistant against the various attacks, nodes in a sensor network can establish pairwise secret keys, authenticate all communications with cryptographic functions, and also apply secure information aggregation schemes or hop-by-hop filtering methods. However, these security measures can take considerable overhead in terms of storage, communication and computation, which are scarce resources in sensor nodes. Previously proposed security measures can only resist against a limited number of compromised nodes, which we define as the resistance level. In this paper, we propose a separate solution to any security measure. This technique either significantly reduces the overhead, or increases the resistance level without increasing overhead. The solution is based on a new "mixed multi-channel" (MMC) architecture. In this design, each node can only use one fixed channel. The whole network is thus divided into multiple "planes" by the different planes. Exploiting the characteristics of multi-channel communication, a series of methods are proposed, such as MMC-1, MMC-k and MMC-r. We then present designs to integrate the methods with current security measures, and analyze their resistance level and energy conservation.