Secure Routing Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks: Survey

Security is critical in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) as they are utilized in various industries, including military, environmental monitoring, surveillance, and health care. Furthermore, it is considered a challenge for WSNs due to their limited resources, and deployments of the sensors in unattended and hostile filed have led to a growing demand for secure energy-effective protocols. Therefore, it needs to balance between security and energy consumption to keep the network's lifetime as long as possible with an acceptable level of security. Besides, the way of deploying the sensors in an unattended manner or hostile environment has led to the need for secure routing protocols to protect the transmission of data from the sensors to the base station. In this paper, we have outlined the network layer routing attacks on WSNs. This survey also discusses secure routing techniques for WSN and we have provided a comparison between existing secure routing protocols in terms of energy usage and the basic metric of security objective. Additionally, the latest strategies that are used by researchers in this field and the methods used to balance security and energy consumption were presented. Finally, the conclusion shows that most of the recent secure routing algorithms are not very effective due to various reasons like a huge amount of energy consumption, and large transmission overhead.