A Hierarchical Secure Reliable Routing Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

There are many routing protocols in wireless sensor networks (WSNs), but most of them don't take security into account. Routing protocols without security mechanism would expose the whole network to the adversaries. The adversaries can launch passive and active attacks, and destroy the whole network. Though there is much on secure protocols for wireless sensor networks recently, it is still not sufficient for routing issue. In this paper, we propose a hierarchical secure reliable routing protocol for wireless sensor networks. In our protocol, the routing path is built in the initial phase of the network setting based on hierarchy, and the protocol utilizes symmetric cryptography to achieve security of routing path. Through the analysis, the protocol can ensure the data confidentiality, data integrity and against passive and active attacks.