A Secure Routing and Aggregation Protocol with Low Energy Cost for Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks are increasingly deployed in security-critical areas, such as battle field. However, general sensor nodes are manufactured with inexpensive components, and they are short of security enhancement. Therefore, an adversary could capture and compromise sensor nodes easily, then launch some malicious attacks (including tampering or discarding useful data collected from source nodes). In this paper, we propose a secure routing and aggregation protocol with low energy cost for sensor networks (named STAPLE), which utilizes one-way hash chain and multi-path mechanism to achieve security of wireless sensor networks, and develop a network expanding model to control communication cost incurred by multi-path routing. We perform the simulation of STAPLE in comparison with INSENS, the results demonstrate that STAPLE achieves a higher level security and it is efficient in large scale sensor networks with considerably low communication overhead.