Energy-efficient and reliable data collection in wireless sensor networks

Ensuring energy efficiency, data reliability, and security is important in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). A combination of variants from the cryptographic secret sharing technique and the disjoint multipath routing scheme is an effective strategy to address these requirements. Although Shamir's secret sharing (SSS) provides the desired reliability and information-theoretic security, it is not energy efficient. Alternatively, Shamir's ramp secret sharing (SRSS) provides energy efficiency and data reliability, but is only computationally secure. We argue that both these approaches may suffer from a compromised node (CN) attack when a minimum number of nodes is compromised. Hence, we propose a new scheme that is energy efficient, provides data reliability, and is secure against CN attacks. The core idea of our scheme is to combine SRSS and a round-reduced AES cipher, which we call "split hop AES (SHAES)". Both the simulation results and the theoretical analysis are employed to validate the near-sink CN attack, and a secure reliable scheme using SHAES is proposed.