Secret Sharing-Based Energy-Aware and Multi-Hop Routing Protocol for IoT Based WSNs

Internet of Things (IoT) enables modern improvements in smart sensors, RFID, Internet technologies, and communication protocols. Sensor nodes are treated as smart devices and widely used to gather and forward sensed information. However, besides intrinsic constraints on sensor nodes, they are vulnerable to a variety of security threats. This paper presents an energy-aware and secure multi-hop routing (ESMR) protocol by using a secret sharing scheme to increase the performance of energy efficiency with multi-hop data security against malicious actions. The proposed protocol comprises three main aspects. First, the network field is segmented into inner and outer zones based on the node location. Furthermore, in each zone, numerous clusters are generated on the basis of node neighborhood vicinity. Second, the data transmission from cluster heads in each zone towards the sink node is secured using the proposed efficient secret sharing scheme. In the end, the proposed solution evaluates the quantitative analysis of data links to minimize the routing disturbance. The presented work provides a lightweight solution with secure data routing in multi-hop approach for the IoT-based constrained wireless sensor networks (WSNs). The experimental results demonstrate the efficacy of proposed energy-aware and secure multi-hop routing protocol in terms of network lifetime by 38%, network throughput by 34%, energy consumption by 34%, average end-to-end delay by 28%, and routing overhead by 36% in comparison with the existing work.