A Secure and Energy-Aware Routing Protocol for Optimal Routing in Mobile Wireless Sensor Networks (MWSNs)

Abstract

Background and Objective: Mobile Wireless Sensor Network (MWSN) is a specialized wireless network made up of large number of mobile sensors, where each sensor is capable of changing its location, relaying data to either the base station or neighbouring nodes. MWSN has emerged as a useful integral part of modern communication systems; however, its major performance challenges are lack of data delivery assurance due to mobility of its sensors, low computational power of its nodes, and some security related issues. Methods: Most of the existing WSN routing protocols are for non-mobile sensors and require considerably high computational power. Thus, not suitable for energy-constraint WSN with mobile sensors. Therefore, there is need for a secure protocol for MWSN with mechanisms that take into account the limited resources of the nodes and dynamism of its nodes’ locations. Results: In this paper, an efficient routing protocol for MWSN is proposed, not to only improve data delivery but to ensure reliability. This protocol is capable of selecting optimal multi-hop route among available routes for the source node and securely hops the data to the destination nodes through intermediary nodes. Formal and informal security analysis of the routing protocol is done to ascertain the required security level of the protocol. In addition, computational cost analysis is done to evaluate the computational cost of the protocol. Conclusion: The analysis results showed that the proposed protocol was secure and required low computational cost.