OLWS: Optimized Light Weight Secure Clustering protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

The amount of research in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) is gaining a lot of interest in the research community. The sensors are deployed in the remote areas and establishment of communications between these nodes is ad-hoc in nature and thus are vulnerable to multiple security attacks which result in low network performance. The main bottleneck in these sensor nodes is the limited resources and because of that traditional security mechanism which involves complex computations and large communication overhead are not feasible. So designing and implementing a secure and efficient WSN is a challenging task. In this paper, we present a novel approach called “Optimized Light Weight Secure Clustering protocol (OLWS) for WSN” to increase the security with reduced overhead. In OLWS, the key for hashing is generated dynamically and calculated based on the identity of the node hence the complexity of key management is reduced. The proposed protocol leads to early detection of the attacker as in case of attack, the adversary node is identified at the cluster head only. Extensive simulations are done on NS2 and results indicate that OLWS performs better in terms of energy consumption and provide an increased level of security.