Improving the Security and Routing Performance of Wireless Sensor Networks

In wireless sensor networks (WSNs) point-to-point routing successfully employed by geographic routing, which assumes that a packet can be moved closer to the destination in the network topology. This assumption, however, may lead packets to the local minimum where no neighbors of the sender are closer to the destination or low quality routes that comprise long distance hops of low packet reception ratio. To address the local minimum problem, we propose a topology aware routing (TAR) protocol that efficiently encodes a network topology into a low-dimensional virtual coordinate space where hop distances between pair wise nodes are preserved and also we improve routing quality by embedding a network topology based on the metric of expected transmission count (ETX). Further, we investigate the facts of ensuring secure sensed data in a balanced energy network backbone, and propose energy-efficient secure path algorithm (ESPA) for WSNs. It is a process of ensuring sensed data authenticity and integrity under a well-structured energy efficient routing.