Informatics Publishing Limited

Mohamed H. Taha ¹, Nour El Din M. Khalifa ¹, Hesham N. Elmahdy ¹, Imane A. Saroit ¹

Affiliations
1 Information Technology Department, Cairo University, Cairo, EG

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have become an attracted research and industry interest. In WSN, each node is attached to a battery, which supply the node with energy required for data sensing, processing and transmission. Transmitted packets are queued at intermediate nodes. Each node schedules the queued packets by assigning priorities to each packet. Priorities are assigned to packets according to their deadlines. This method in packet prioritization does not take into consideration either the network life time or energy consumption. Besides, it may lead to dropping high energy valuable packets. In many applications, WSN lifetime is considered a very critical issue, while setting up the network. In this paper, we paper we introduce new scheduling schema, called Energy Based Scheduling schema. In this schema, packets are not only prioritized according to their deadlines but also to some energy measures related to the network. These energy measures are obtained from the network nodes and are used in packet prioritization. The proposed schema is integrated with the AODV routing protocol. The unused bits in the AODV packets are used by the proposed schema in assigning sending priorities to each packet in the network. Through this paper, we will compare the proposed scheduling schema against the Basic Priority Scheduling schema, using NS-2. Comparisons are done according the network life time and energy consumption.

Keywords

Wireless Sensor Networks, Scheduling Schema, AODV, NS-2.

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Nour El Din M. Khalifa ¹, Mohamed H. Taha ¹, Hesham N. Elmahdy ¹, Imane A. Saroit ¹

Affiliations
1 Information Technology Department, Cairo University, Cairo, EG

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are usually deployed for gathering data from unattended or hostile environments. Therefore, securing data transmission across these environments is a must. Due to the fact that the sensors have a limited power, any security mechanism for sensor network must be energy efficient. In this paper, a secure energy efficient mechanism is introduced with a proposed scenario which leads to a significant improvement in network energy consumption. The mechanism constructs its security features in the application and transport layer as the information that the attackers seek ultimately resides within these layers. We modified the packet format for WSN. Data payload was encrypted by Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) and Message Authentication Code (MAC) was generated to assure data confidentiality and integrity. The energy consumption metric has been taken into considerations while designing and testing the mechanism to make it energy efficient as much as possible. The energy efficiency was achieved by giving a higher priority to the secured packet over the normal packet in the Interface Queue (IFQ). Through this paper, a detailed structure of the proposed mechanism is introduced and implemented using Network Simulator-2 (NS-2). This is the first research that implements security algorithms within NS-2. Since NS- 2 does not support any security features before, this research will be a
good start to begin using NS-2 as a security simulator.

Keywords

Wireless Sensor Networks, Security, Encryption, AES, MAC, NS-2, IFQ.

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