Secure Energy-Efficient Clustering Protocol for Lifetime Maximization in Smart Sensor Networks

Nodes represent the core of wireless sensor networks, as being able to connect and exchange information. Despite their limited power and the issue of energy consumption that clearly affects their performance, it has become quite urgent to tackle this issue due to the ongoing need to deploy wireless sensor networks in many fields. To maintain the utmost benefit of nodes regardless their energy consumption problem, clustering has been suggested as the best available solution and this paper introduces a clustering-based routing algorithm to help nodes transmit data to the base station using k-means for selecting clusters. Here, two clusters are chosen, one for collecting data and the other for transmitting it and via a multi-hop approach, the data will be sent to the base station and, hence, the quality and the lifetime of the network will be improved. Energy and security should be considered when choosing the most suitable cost path to achieve the most efficient energy consumption method. The related existing authentication techniques are likely to face many challenges such as the lack of authorization, the limited resources, and the need for a lightweight authentication protocol. Therefore, it is important to provide a security framework and protect the network from attacks with minimum power consumption. This paper proposes a secure and robust three-factor-based authentication protocol, called defense-WSN, which can ensure mutual authentication between nodes and prevent security threats. The simulation results show that the proposed approach can deliver higher performance and lower power consumption compared to other conventional solutions.