SERA: A Secure Energy and Reliability Aware Data Gathering for Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks are used in many applications in military, ecological, health, and other areas. These applications often include the monitoring of sensitive information making the security issue one of the most important aspects to consider in this field. However, most of protocols optimize for the limited capabilities of sensor nodes and the application specific nature of the networks, but they are vulnerable to serious security attacks. In this paper, a Secure Energy and Reliability Aware data gathering protocol (SERA) is proposed, which provides energy efficiency and data delivery reliability as well as a security scheme giving protection against the most common network layer attacks such as spoofed, altered, or replayed routing information, selective forwarding, sinkhole attacks, Sybil attacks, wormhole attacks, HELLO flood attacks, and acknowledgment spoofing attacks.