Abstract:
Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) refer to a group of sensors with the ability to network through wireless means in harsh environmental conditions capable of sensing temperature, humidity, and pressure, sound etc. These sensors are limited in terms of battery life affecting the networks performance and lifetime. These tiny devices transmit the data to the base station which is susceptible to be compromised if not encrypted. Therefore, the greatest challenge in wireless sensor networks is to balance the energy consumption and provide security simultaneously without degrading the lifetime or network performance. These limitations exist in WSN due to the large scale, open and resource constrained nature of the sensor networks. Several protocols exist for transmitting data to the base station but when these networks provide a secure data transmission they mostly suffer from key management, encryption time and many other limitations. Our algorithm uses a classical hierarchical routing technique to route the data from the nodes to the base station using a clustering technique. The cluster head selection has been performed using the modified LEACH protocol based on residual energy to increase the network lifetime. The data is then routed from the cluster heads to the base station using Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm to minimize the energy consumption while providing encryption from the nodes to the base station. The encryption has been performed using a modified version of Flex Crypt algorithm with simple computations and the results are analyzed in terms of network performance and stability. After simulating the algorithm in MATLAB and comparing with the existing protocols such as LEACH, PSO and FlexCrypt the proposed algorithm revealed an improvement in the number of dead nodes, network energy consumption and the number of packets delivered to the base station while providing end to end data security. The encryption time was found to be better than the previous protocols. All the above factors reveal an improvement in the network throughput and enhanced lifetime while providing security.
