Secure routing and broadcast authentication in heterogeneous sensor networks

Security of sensor network communication architecture relies on its routing scheme. This paper presents a secure routing scheme for heterogeneous sensor networks (HSNs). HSNs have proven to be more secure and scalable as compared to homogeneous sensor networks which are prone to routing attacks due to resource constraints. In our proposed scheme, routing tables are generated with multipath routing. Base station generates inter-cluster routes and cluster head generates intra-cluster routes. This minimizes the computation load on cluster nodes. We also provide light-weight broadcast authentication used for secure routing table generation and data communication; and to reduce communication overhead. Further, proposed scheme introduces security architecture with in routing protocol. The analysis of proposed scheme shows that it is secure against routing attacks and tolerant to compromised nodes.