Transmission cost minimization with vulnerability constraint in wireless sensor networks

In wireless sensor networks, one of the primary requirements is that sensor data derived from the physical world can be interchanged with all interested collaborative entities in a secure and reliable manner. Due to highly unpredictable environments where sensor nodes are usually deployed, minimizing the transmission cost with jointly taking into account the security of the whole network poses a challenging task. With this end, this paper considers an optimization problem of deriving the minimum cost paths from multiple source nodes, which are deployed in the area of interest, to the sink node under the constraint that the vulnerability of the whole network is under the given level. The vulnerability is defined as a metric which characterizes the degree of edge and node sharing among different paths. With the defined vulnerability, vulnerability-constrained minimum cost paths problem is formulated and two polynomial-time algorithms are developed for deriving the optimal paths. The necessary condition for the existence of the optimal solution, and the optimality of the proposed algorithms are analyzed in the theoretical. Extensive simulations show the significant performance enhancements achieved by our proposed algorithms.