An energy efficient, fault tolerant and secure clustering scheme for M2M communication networks

Machine to Machine (M2M) communication networks starts to achieve widespread usability in different application domains. Thus, designing energy efficient, fault tolerant and secure clustering scheme is significantly important for the M2M area networks that comprise a large number of sensors. However, to the best of our knowledge, existing secure clustering schemes for M2M communication networks do not support fault tolerance and energy efficiency together. Thus, this paper introduces an Energy efficient, fault tolerant and Secure clustering mechanism for M2M (ESM) area networks that minimizes the number of cluster heads (CHs) and active member nodes. The ESM clustering scheme includes a simple, lightweight but very effective security mechanism that uses simple permutation-based shared keys between (i) member nodes and CHs, (ii) inter-cluster gateway nodes and CHs and (iii) CHs and Machine Type Communication (MTC) gateway. Experimental results demonstrate that the ESM clustering scheme reduces network energy consumption as compared to the existing DSC and LEACH protocols. Security analysis also reveals that ESM is effective against well-known attacks such as sybil, wormhole, and black hole.