Two Tier Secure Routing Protocol for Heterogeneous Sensor Networks

Research on sensor network routing focused on efficiency and effectiveness of data dissemination. Few of them considered security issues during the design time of a routing protocol. Furthermore, previous research on sensor networks mainly considered homogeneous sensor networks where all sensor nodes have the same capabilities. It has been shown that homogeneous ad hoc networks have poor fundamental performance limits and scalability. To achieve better performance, we adopt a heterogeneous sensor network (HSN) model. In this paper, we present a secure and efficient routing protocol for HSNs - two tier secure routing (TTSR). TTSR takes advantage of powerful high-end sensors in an HSN. Our security analysis demonstrates that TTSR can defend typical attacks on sensor routing. Our performance evaluation shows that TTSR has higher delivery ratio, lower end-to-end delay and energy consumption than a popular sensor network routing protocol.