Development of Energy and Delay Efficient Protocols for WSAN

Abstract

Wireless sensor-actor network (WSAN) is a collection of resource conservative sensors and few resource-rich actors. It is widely used in various applications such as environmental monitoring, battlefield surveillance, industrial process control, and home applications. In these real-time applications, data should be delivered with minimum delay and energy. In this thesis, delay and energy efficient protocols are designed to achieve these objectives. The first contribution proposes a delay and energy aware coordination protocol (DEACP) to improve the network performance. It consists of two-level hierarchical K-hop clustering and backup cluster head (BCH) selection mechanism to provide coordination among sensors and actors. Further, a priority based event forwarding mechanism has also been proposed to forward the maximum number of packets within the bounded delay. The simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of DEACP over existing protocols. In the second work, an interference aware multi-channel MAC protocol (IAMMAC) has been suggested to assign channels for the communication among nodes in the DEACP. An actor assigns the static channels to all of its cluster members for sensor-sensor and sensor-actor coordination. Subsequently, a throughput based dynamic channel selection mechanism has been developed for actor-actor coordination. It is inferred from the simulation results that the proposed IAMMAC protocol outperforms its competitive protocols. Even though its performance is superior, it is susceptible to be attacked because it uses a single static channel between two sensors in the entire communication. To overcome this problem, a lightweight dynamic multi-channel MAC protocol (DM-MAC) has been designed for sensor sensor coordination. Each sensor dynamically selects a channel which provides maximum packet reception ratio among the available hannels with the destination. The comparative analysis shows that DM-MAC protocol performs better than the existing MAC protocols in terms of different performance parameters. WSAN is designed to operate in remote and hostile environments and hence, sensors and actors are vulnerable to various attacks. The fourth contribution proposes a secure coordination mechanism (SCM) to handle the data forwarding attacks in DEACP. In the SCM, each sensor computes the trust level of its neighboring sensors based on the experience, recommendation, and knowledge. The actor analyzes the trust values of all its cluster members to identify the malicious node. Secure hash algorithm-3 is used to compute the message authentication code for the data. The sensor selects a neighbor sensor which has the highest trust value among its 1-hop sensors to transfer data to the actor. The SCM approach outperforms the existing security mechanisms.