Joint Energy-Saving Scheduling and Secure Routing for Critical Event Reporting in Wireless Sensor Networks

With the growing concerns about energy saving and security problems in wireless sensor networks (WSNs), we investigated a joint energy saving scheduling and secure routing algorithm for critical event reporting in WSN. When a critical event has been detected, the notification must be safely sent to the sink node through the uplink transmission, and the sink node needs to broadcast the alarm messages to the whole network through the downlink transmission. In the uplink, a joint power allocation and secure routing strategy (JPASR) has been proposed to maximize the routing secure connection probability (RSCP) under the constraint of power. Meanwhile, combined with the level-by-level sleeping scheduling method, the energy-saving and secure uplink transmission can be guaranteed. In the downlink, an energy-first multi-point relays set selection mechanism (EFMSS) is designed to choose the backbone nodes to broadcast messages, and the backbone nodes are waken up by the same level-by-level sleeping scheduling method as the uplink transmission. With the two-step procedure, the critical events are appropriately dealt with and the responses are broadcast to the whole network. Extensive simulations results demonstrate that the energy saving and security performances of the proposed method are superior to the existing ones.