A comprehensive analysis and hardware implementation of comsec and transec for wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) require secure communication framework because of their vulnerability against different types of malicious attacks. The main objective of this research work is to implement a secure and reliable communication framework for WSNs. A comprehensive study of existing communication security and transmission security methods for WSNs has been carried out. Encryption algorithm AES-256 has been implemented on microcontroller hardware and modifications have been made to enhance the speed of processing and reduce requirement of computational resources. For transmission security, a mechanism of frequency hopping and its synchronization has been proposed and implemented to achieve hop rate of 100 hops/sec for WSNs. The spectrum of proposed system has also been analyzed using Universal Serial Radio Peripheral 2 devices. Proposed system offers data confidentiality, reliability and improved link quality.