An Energy-Efficient and Secured Hop-by-Hop Authentication Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is a collection of tiny nodes which are widely deployed in a given environment to sense the natural phenomenon and send the sensed information to via control station using multihop communication. The advantages of the WSNs are their cost efficient and effective communication in unattended environments. Most of the existing WSNs fail to perform adequate privacy and security. They provide security during communication by means of hash functions and symmetric key cryptosystems which are energy-efficient and vulnerable in nature. In this paper, a novel energy-efficient secure authentication protocol is proposed, which is able to provide hop-by-hop authentication using distributed elliptical curve cryptography. The proposed protocol can provide a trade-off between energy efficiency and security. The proposed protocol is tested with NS2 simulator. The simulation results justify that proposed protocol improves packet delivery ratio, optimizes the energy consumption, and increases the lifetime of the nodes in a network.