CLEAR: A confidential and Lifetime-Aware Routing Protocol for wireless sensor network

A key challenge of the resource-constrained wireless sensor network is to prolong the lifetime as long as possible. Researchers have proved data transmission consumes most energy of sensor nodes, and the routing policy has great influence on network lifetime. Another important factor is the location confidentiality of base station that may be easily captured by a packet-tracing adversary due to the open communication nature of sensor network. In this paper, we design a new routing scheme called CLEAR: A Confidential and Lifetime-Aware Routing Protocol. In CLEAR, the paths between sources and base station keep changing throughout the whole lifetime in order to make best use of the limited node energy. On the other hand, we introduce an extended confidentiality protection mechanism called Branching, combining with the basic confidentiality feature of CLEAR as a whole. Comprehensive simulations prove that CLEAR extends the lifetime of sensor network almost twice as much as that of the basic routing protocol, and prominently enhances the base station location confidentiality compared with several existing schemes.