Energy efficient and secure wireless communications for wireless sensor networks

This dissertation considers wireless sensor networks (WSNs) operating in severe environments where energy efficiency and security are important factors. This main aim of this research is to improve routing protocols in WSNs to ensure efficient energy usage and protect against attacks (especially energy draining attacks) targeting WSNs. An enhancement of the existing AODV (Ad hoc On-Demand Distance Vector) routing protocol for energy efficiency, called AODV-Energy Harvesting Aware (AODVEHA), is proposed and evaluated. It not only inherits the advantages of AODV which are well suited to ad hoc networks, but also makes use of the energy harvesting capability of sensor nodes in the network. In addition to the investigation of energy efficiency, another routing protocol called Secure and Energy Aware Routing Protocol (ETARP) designed for energy efficiency and security of WSNs is presented. The key part of the ETARP is route selection based on utility theory, which is a novel approach to simultaneously factor energy efficiency and trustworthiness of routes in the routing protocol. Finally, this dissertation proposes a routing protocol to protect against a specific type of resource depletion attack called Vampire attacks. The proposed resource-conserving protection against energy draining (RCPED) protocol is independent of cryptographic methods, which brings advantage of less energy cost and hardware requirement. RCPED collaborates with existing routing protocols, detects abnormal sign of Vampire attacks and determines the possible attackers. Then routes are discovered and selected on the basis of maximum priority, where the priority that reflects the energy efficiency and safety level of route is calculated by means of Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP). The proposed analytic model for the aforementioned routing solutions are verified by simulations. Simulations results validate the improvements of proposed routing approaches in terms of better energy efficiency and guarantee of security.

Name dc:type.qualificationname

phd

Level dc:type.qualificationlevel

doctoral

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

City, University of London

Year dc:date.issued

2017

Author dc:creator

• Gong, P.

• QA75 Electronic computers. Computer science