On security and Opportunistic Routing in Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

The sensor networks are the result of advancements in micro-technologies and are increasing in demand. This is because of the abilities of sensors to operate in unattended and hostile environments. Due to advancements in nanotechnology and micro-system developments, researchers can now develop small sensor nodes which may be deployed to collect field data. Sensor nodes are able to gather data from the area of interest and communicate the same to high processing capacity nodes. Sensor nodes are able to communicate any type of chemical or physical data collected from their surroundings. The data collection and communication is not easy as it will be difficult to reach certain areas of interests like dense forests or deep in the sea or inside the core of the earth. These types of environments may be monitored by using wireless sensor networks, which consists of small-sized sensor nodes with limited resources. In wireless sensor networks (WSN), the data must reach to an infrastructure processing node. The sensor nodes follow a common communication pattern by using routing mechanisms. Routing is the most important phase of network operations because the sensor nodes have limited resources to perform all the network operations. Traditional routing protocols cannot cope up with the failures and malicious activities in unstable application environments. Therefore alternative methods must be designed and researched to achieve performance goals. newlineThe opportunistic routing (OR) in wireless sensor networks (WSN) is gaining popularity due to high throughput, low delays, and good packet delivery ratios. Providing data integrity, availability and reliability with less energy exhaustion are very important in WSN. To achieve all of these properties, the routing protocols must ensure the security of route selection process to avoid the participation of malicious nodes. Also, there is a need for energy conservation while providing security to increase the network lifetime and throughput.