The Research On The Security Of Cluster-based Routing Protocols In Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) consist of low-cost, low-power tiny sensor nodes that can communicate with each other to perform sensing and data processing cooperatively in ad-hoc manner. It can be used in the fields of military war, environmental monitoring, medical treatment,intelligent home, agriculture and traffic management, etc. Routing protocol is one of the pivotal technologies and the clustering routing protocol is a research hotspot in routing protocol field. However, almost all of these protocols do not take security into consideration. As a result,they are vulnerable to various attacks and can not be applied to many fields. Besides, due to the limit of the energy, communicating ability, computing speed, and storage of the sensors, the traditional security mechanisms are not suitable for wireless sensor network. Therefore, how to design an effective key management protocol for sensor network has become a hot research.This paper start analyzing the typital cluster-based routing protocol with the characteristics of routing protocols, design methods, evaluation indicators in wireless sensor networks, points out the relative merits existed in routing protocols and presents the security threats it faced as well as the secure routing solutions. Then introduces the evaluation criteria of key management in wireless sensor networks, followed by analyzing of several typical cluster-based network model of key management, identified the shortcomings of them and towards the areas of improvement. Finally, a secure routing protocol for clustered sensor networks is proposed. Improving the election method of cluster-head, adding authenticate the legitimacy of the cluster-head, providing the pre-shared key distribution , periodic broadcast authentication and periodic re-keying , dealing with an addition of new nodes and deletion of nodes being captured as well as the process of secure data communication. The Simulation results demonstrated that the proposed scheme has higher success rate of key updating while incuring lower delay, besides, the scheme is more energy- efficient and extend the network lifetime as compared with existing key management protocol.