Data dependability based bimodal encryption scheme for distributed routing in wireless sensor networks

The development of smart cities and their fast-paced deployment leads to the creation of massive amount of data at exceptional rates. Due to the data gathering and tracking nature of wireless sensor networks (WSN), it finds applications in various domains. Presently, security is considered as an important design issue of developing multipath routing protocols in WSN. The existing routing techniques either concentrate on energy efficiency or security issues with maximum resource utilization. This paper focuses on the idea of incorporating encryption algorithms on multihop routing mechanism in WSN. Here, routing takes place by the Augmented Tree Based Routing (ATR) which is a tree-based multipath routing method. To attain higher level of security, two encryption algorithms namely lightweight encryption algorithm (LEA) and two phase hybrid cryptography algorithm (THCA) are employed based on the data dependability. The encryption algorithms are utilized based on data dependability where general data is encrypted by LEA and other confidential data are encrypted by THCA. i.e. the LEA is used to send proactive data and the important reactive data is encrypted by THCA. For routing purposes, Augmented Tree Based Routing (ATR) is used. From experimentation, it is evident that the presented method exhibits enhanced performance by means of throughput, control overhead and network lifetime even though there exist some misbehaving nodes in the network.