An Efficient and Secure Routing Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks Using Multicasting

Recent technological advancements in the field of nanotechnology have increased the computation power of the wireless nodes while adhering to the energy constraints. This has made the use of the Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), more widespread, used in applications such as area monitoring, industrial monitoring, vehicle detection or military monitoring. Sensor nodes have made it possible to collect data even in hostile environments, but because of the severe security and energy constraints faced by sensor networks, their deployment on a large scale is still a tricky job. A secure energy efficient routing algorithm is thus the need of the hour. SPIN, Sensor Protocol for Information via Negotiation, is one of the widely used energy efficient routing protocol in WSNs that completely ignores the security aspect. This paper involves proposing an alternate routing protocol, MS-SPIN, which incorporates the best features of SPIN while also addressing the security issue. The implementation of MS-SPIN in NS2 has shown that, for a larger number of nodes, its energy performance characteristics are comparable to those of SPIN while providing security features.