New Approach to Secure Cluster Heads in Wireless Sensor Networks

摘要

This Wireless Sensor Network is a network of devices that communicates the information gathered from a monitored field through wireless links. Small size sensor nodes constitute wireless sensor networks. A Sensor is a device that responds and detects some type of input from both the physical or environmental conditions, such as pressure, heat, light, etc. Applications of wireless sensor networks include home automation, street lighting, military, healthcare and industrial process monitoring. As wireless sensor networks are distributed across large geographical area, these are vulnerable to various security threats. This affects the performance of the wireless sensor networks. The impact of security issues will become more critical if the network is used for mission-critical applications like tactical battlefield. In real life deployment scenarios, the probability of failure of nodes is more. As a result of resource constraints in the sensor nodes, traditional methods which involve large overhead computation and communication are not feasible in WSNs. Hence, design and deployment of secured WSNs is a challenging task. Attacks on WSNs include attack on confidentiality, integrity and availability. There are various types of architectures that are used to deploy WSNs. Some of them are data centric, hierarchical, location based, mobility based etc. This work discusses the security issue of hierarchical architecture and proposes a solution. In hierarchical architectures, sensor nodes are grouped to form clusters. Intra-cluster communication happens through cluster heads. Cluster heads also facilitate inter-cluster communication with other cluster heads. Aggregation of data generated by sensor nodes is done by cluster heads. Aggregated data also get transferred to base through multi-hop approach in most cases. Cluster heads are vulnerable to various malicious attacks and this greatly affects the performance of the wireless sensor network. The proposed solution identifies attacked cluster head and changes the CH by identifying the fittest node using genetic algorithm based search.