A Secure Energy Mechanism for WSN and Its Implementation in NS-2

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are usually deployed for gathering data from unattended or hostile environments. Therefore, securing data transmission across these environments is a must. Due to the fact that the sensors have a limited power, any security mechanism for sensor network must be energy efficient. In this paper, a secure energy efficient mechanism is introduced with a proposed scenario which leads to a significant improvement in network energy consumption. The mechanism constructs its security features in the application and transport layer as the information that the attackers seek ultimately resides within these layers. We modified the packet format for WSN. Data payload was encrypted by Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) and Message Authentication Code (MAC) was generated to assure data confidentiality and integrity. The energy consumption metric has been taken into considerations while designing and testing the mechanism to make it energy efficient as much as possible. The energy efficiency was achieved by giving a higher priority to the secured packet over the normal packet in the Interface Queue (IFQ). Through this paper, a detailed structure of the proposed mechanism is introduced and implemented using Network Simulator-2 (NS-2). This is the first research that implements security algorithms within NS-2. Since NS- 2 does not support any security features before, this research will be a
good start to begin using NS-2 as a security simulator.