Secure And Efficient Data Transfer For Hierarchical Based Wireless Sensor

Networks

CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION
A Network is defined as the group of people or systems or organizations who tend to
share their information collectively for their business purpose. In Computer terminology the
definition for networks is similar as a group of computers logically connected for the sharing
of information or services (like print services, multi-tasking, etc.). Initially Computer
networks were started as a necessity for sharing files and printers but later this has moved
from that particular job of file and printer sharing to application sharing and business logic
sharing. These networks may be fixed (cabled, permanent) or temporary. A network can be
characterized as wired or wireless. Wireless can be distinguished from wired as no physical
connectivity between nodes are needed. The wireless network can again further be classified
being mobile ad hoc networks and wireless sensor networks.
A Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) consists of spatially distributed autonomous
sensors connected via a (wireless) communications infrastructure to cooperatively monitor,
record and store physical or environmental conditions, such as temperature, sound, vibration,
pressure, motion or pollutants. A Wireless Sensor Network is a self-configuring network of
small sensor nodes communicating among themselves using radio signals, and deployed in
quantity to sense, monitor and understand the physical world. Wireless Sensor nodes are
called motes. WSN provide a bridge between the real physical and virtual worlds. Allow the
ability to observe the previously unobservable at a fine resolution over large spatiotemporal
scales. Have a wide range of potential applications to industry, science, transportation, civil
infrastructure, and security.

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Fig 1.1 Wireless Sensor Network

Wireless sensor networks have seen tremendous advances and utilization in the past
two decades. Starting from petroleum exploration, mining, weather and even battle
operations, all of these require sensor applications. One reason behind the growing popularity
of wireless sensors is that they can work in remote areas without manual intervention. All the
user needs to do is to gather the data sent by the sensors, and with certain analysis extract
meaningful information from them. Usually sensor applications involve many sensors
deployed together. These sensors form a network and collaborate with each other to gather
data and send it to the base station. The base station acts as the control centre where the data
from the sensors are gathered for further analysis and processing. In a nutshell, a wireless
sensor network (WSN) is a wireless network consisting of spatially distributed nodes which
use sensors to monitor physical or environmental conditions. These nodes combine with
routers and gateways to create a WSN system. There are several applications of wireless
sensor networks such as area monitoring, Environment/Earth monitoring, forest fire detection
and natural disaster like tsunamis, volcanoes, health care, traffic control and home
automation.
Some of the characteristics of wireless sensor networks are the, ability to withstand
bad environmental conditions, can deal with node failures, portable have dynamic network
topology, communicate failures their node heterogeneity, large scale of deployment,
unattended operation, capacity of a node is scalable, only limited by the bandwidth of a
gateway node. Secure data transfer is most critical issue for WSN. Generally, most of WSNs
are deployed with rough, crude, deffered physical environment for military and healthcare
domain with trustless background. So, securely data transmission is necessary and most
practical vision in WSN
.
Security in sensor networks includes confidentiality, integrity and availability.
Confidentiality in WSNs is accomplished by preventing outsiders from eavesdropping on
transmissions. This is generally achieved by enciphering the relevant parts of a packet.
Integrity in general means that the receiver is assured that the network packet was not
tampered with or the message altered in some way. By ensuring the availability we mean that
the data is available in a timely fashion so that it is useful to the user. Availability in WSNs is
of great concern to the user of the network. Unfortunately, many existing security primitives

Secure And Efficient Data Transfer For Hierarchical Based Wireless Sensor
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cannot be used in WSNs, either because the computing power of the sensors is too limited or
the additional work created by the protocols causes excessive network traffic.
In a typical WSN, a large number of sensor nodes collect application specific
information from the environment and this information is transferred to a central base station
where it is processed, analyzed, and used by the application. In these resource constrained
networks, the general approach is to jointly process the data generated by different sensors
while being forwarded toward the base station [5]. Such distributed in-network processing of
data is generally called as data aggregation and involves combining the data that belong the
same phenomenon. The main objective of hierarchical data aggregation is to increase the
network lifetime by reducing the resource consumption of sensor nodes (such as battery
energy and bandwidth). While increasing network lifetime, data aggregation protocols may
degrade the important quality of service metrics in wireless sensor networks, such as data
accuracy, latency, fault-tolerance, and security. Therefore, the design of an efficient data
aggregation protocol is an inherently challenging task because the protocol designer must
tradeoff between energy efficiency, data accuracy, fault-tolerance, latency, and security. In
order to achieve this trade off, data aggregation techniques are tightly coupled with how
packets are routed through the sensor network. Hence, the architecture of the WSN plays a
vital role in the performance of different data aggregation protocols. There are several
protocols that allow routing and aggregation of network packets simultaneously. These
protocols can be categorized into two parts: cluster-based data aggregation protocols and tree
based data aggregation protocols. To reduce the latency due to tree based data aggregation,
recent work on data aggregation process tends to group sensor nodes into clusters so that data
are aggregated in each group for improved efficiency.

Secure And Efficient Data Transfer For Hierarchical Based Wireless Sensor
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CHAPTER 2
CLASSIFICATION OF ROUTING PROTOCOLS
Routing techniques are required for sending data between sensor nodes and the base
stations for communication. Different routing protocols are proposed for wireless sensor
network. These protocols can be classified according to different parameters.
(a)Routing Protocols can be classified as Proactive, Reactive and Hybrid, based on their
mode of functioning and type of target applications.
(b)Routing protocols can be classified as Direct Communication, Flat and Clustering
Protocols, according to the Participation style of the Nodes.
(c)Routing Protocols can be classified as Hierarchical, Data Centric and location based,
depending on the Network Structure.

2.1 BASED ON MODE OF FUNCTIONING AND TYPE OF

TARGET APPLICATIONS
Proactive:In a Proactive Protocol the nodes switch on their sensors and transmitters, sense the
environment and transmit the data to a BS through the predefined route.
Examples: The Low Energy Adaptive Clustering hierarchy protocol (LEACH) utilizes this
type of protocol.
Reactive:If there are sudden changes in the sensed attribute beyond some pre-determined
threshold value, the nodes immediately react. This type of protocol is used in time critical
applications.
Examples: The Threshold sensitive Energy Efficient sensor Network (TEEN) is an example
of a reactive protocol.

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Hybrid:Hybrid protocols incorporate both proactive and reactive concepts. They first compute
all routes and then improve the routes at the time of routing.
Examples: Adaptive Periodic TEEN(APTEEN) is an example of a reactive protocol.

2.2 According to the Participation style of the Nodes

Direct Communication:In this type of protocols, any node can send information to the Base Station(BS)
directly. When this is applied in a very large network, the energy of sensor nodes may be
drained quickly. Its scalability is very small.
Examples: SPIN is an example of this type of protocol.
Flat:In this protocol, if any node needs to transmit data, it first searches for a valid route to
the BS and then transmits the data. Nodes around the base station may drain their energy
quickly. Its scalability is average.
Examples: Rumor Routing is an example of this type of protocol.
Clustering Protocols:According to the clustering protocol, the total area is divided into numbers of clusters.
Each and every cluster has a cluster head (CH) and this cluster head directly communicates
with the BS. All nodes in a cluster send their data to their corresponding CH.
Examples: TEEN is an example of this type of protocol.

2.3 Depending on the Network Structure

Data Centric:Data centric protocols are query based and they depend on the naming of the desired
data, thus it eliminates much redundant transmissions. The BS sends queries to a certain area
for information and waits for reply from the nodes of that particular region. Since data is
requested through queries, attribute based naming is required to specify the properties of the
data. Depending on the query, sensors collect a particular data from the area of interest and

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this particular information is only required to transmit to the BS and thus reducing the
number of transmissions.
Examples: SPIN was the first data centric protocol.
Hierarchical:Hierarchical routing is used to perform energy efficient routing, i.e., higher energy
nodes can be used to process and send the information; low energy nodes are used to perform
the sensing in the area of interest.
Examples: LEACH, TEEN, APTEEN.
Location Based:Location based routing protocols need some location information of the sensor nodes.
Location information can be obtained from GPS (Global Positioning System) signals,
received radio signal strength, etc. Using location information, an optimal path can be formed
without using flooding techniques.
Examples: Geographic and Energy-Aware Routing(GEAR)

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CHAPTER 3
SECURITY CHALLENGES IN WSN
The nature of large, ad-hoc, wireless sensor networks presents significant challenges
in designing security schemes. A wireless sensor network is a special network which has
many constraint compared to a traditional computer network.
Wireless Medium
The wireless medium is inherently less secure because its broadcast nature makes
eavesdropping simple. Any transmission can easily be intercepted, altered, or replayed by an
adversary. The wireless medium allows an attacker to easily intercept valid packets and easily
inject malicious ones. Although this problem is not unique to sensor networks, traditional
solutions must be adapted to efficiently execute on sensor networks.
Ad-Hoc Deployment
The ad-hoc nature of sensor networks means no structure can be statically defined. Nodes
may be deployed by airdrop, so nothing is known of the topology prior to deployment. Since
nodes may fail or be replaced the network must support self configuration. Security schemes
must be able to operate within this dynamic environment.
Hostile Environment
The next challenging factor is the hostile environment in which sensor nodes function. Motes
face the possibility of destruction or capture by attackers. The highly hostile environment
represents a serious challenge for security researchers.
Immense Scale

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The proposed scale of sensor networks poses a significant challenge for security mechanisms.
Simply networking tens to hundreds of thousands of nodes has proven to be a substantial
task.
Security Goals For Sensor Networks
The security goals are classified as primary and secondary. The primary goals are known as
Standard security goals such as Confidentiality, Integrity, authentication and Availability
(CIAA). The secondary goals are Data Freshness, Self Organization, Time Synchronization
and Secure Localization.
Data Confidentiality:
Confidentiality is the ability to conceal messages from a passive attacker so that any
message communicated via the sensor network remains confidential. This is the most
important issue in network security. A sensor node should not reveal its data to the neighbors.
Data Authentication
Authentication ensures the reliability of the message by identifying its origin. An
adversary is not just limited to modifying the data packet. It can change the whole packet
stream by injecting additional packets. So the receiver needs to ensure that the data used in
any decision-making process originates from the correct source. On the other hand, when
constructing the sensor network, authentication is necessary for many administrative tasks
(e.g. network reprogramming or controlling sensor node duty cycle). From the above, we can
see that message authentication is important for many applications in sensor networks.
Informally, data authentication allows a receiver to verify that the data really is sent by the
claimed sender. In the case of two-party communication, data authentication can be achieved
through a purely symmetric mechanism: the sender and the receiver share a secret key to
compute the message authentication code (MAC) of all communicated data.
Data Integrity
Data Integrity in sensor networks is needed to ensure the reliability of data and refers
to the ability to confirm that the message has not been tempered with, altered or changed.
Even if the network has confidentiality measures there is still a possibility that the data
integrity has been compromised by alterations. The integrity of the network will be in trouble
when: A malicious node present in the network injects false data.
Data Availability

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Availability determines whether a node has the ability to use the resources and
whether the network is available for the messages to communicate. However, failure of the
base station or cluster leaders availability will eventually threaten the entire sensor network.
Thus availability is of primary importance for maintaining an operational network.

Data Freshness:
Even if Data Confidentiality and Data Integrity are assured, there is a need to ensure
the freshness of each message. Informally, data freshness suggests that the data is recent, and
it ensures that no old messages have been replayed. To solve this problem a nonce or another
time-related counter, can be added into the packet to ensure data freshness.
Self Organization:
A wireless sensor network is typically an ad-hoc network, which requires every sensor
node be independent and flexible enough to be self-organizing and self-healing according to
different situations. There is no fixed infra-structure available for the purpose of network
management in a sensor network. This inherent feature brings a great challenge to wireless
sensor network security. If self-organization is lacking in a sensor network, the damage
resulting from an attack or even the risky environment may be devastating.
Time Synchronization
Most sensor network applications rely on some form of time synchronization. Sensors
may wish to compute the end to end delay of a packet as it travels between two pair wise
sensors. A more collaborative sensor network may require group synchronization for tracking
applications.
Secure Localization
Often, the utility of a sensor network will rely on its ability to accurately
automatically locate each sensor in the network. A sensor network designed to locate faults
will need accurate location information in order to pin point the location of a fault.
Unfortunately, an attacker can easily manipulate non-secured location information by
reporting false signal strengths, replaying signals.

Secure And Efficient Data Transfer For Hierarchical Based Wireless Sensor
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CHAPTER 4
APPLICATIONS OF WSN
Area monitoring
Area monitoring is a common application of WSNs. In area monitoring, the WSN is
deployed over a region where some phenomenon is to be monitored. A military example is
the use of sensors detect enemy intrusion; a civilian example is the geo-fencing of gas or oil
pipelines.
Health care monitoring
The medical applications can be of two types: wearable and implanted. Wearable
devices are used on the body surface of a human or just at close proximity of the user. The
implantable medical devices are those that are inserted inside human body. There are many
other applications too e.g. body position measurement and location of the person, overall
monitoring of ill patients in hospitals and at homes. Body-area networks can collect
information about an individual's health, fitness, and energy expenditure.
Environmental/Earth sensing
There are many applications in monitoring environmental parameters, examples of
which are given below. They share the extra challenges of harsh environments and reduced
power supply.
Air pollution monitoring
Wireless sensor networks have been deployed in several cities (Stockholm, London
and Brisbane) to monitor the concentration of dangerous gases for citizens. These can take
advantage of the ad hoc wireless links rather than wired installations, which also make them
more mobile for testing readings in different areas.
Forest fire detection

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A network of Sensor Nodes can be installed in a forest to detect when a fire has
started. The nodes can be equipped with sensors to measure temperature, humidity and gases
which are produced by fire in the trees or vegetation. The early detection is crucial for a
successful action of the firefighters; thanks to Wireless Sensor Networks, the fire brigade will
be able to know when a fire is started and how it is spreading.
Landslide detection
A landslide detection system makes use of a wireless sensor network to detect the
slight movements of soil and changes in various parameters that may occur before or during a
landslide. Through the data gathered it may be possible to know the occurrence of landslides
long before it actually happens.
Water quality monitoring
Water quality monitoring involves analyzing water properties in dams, rivers, lakes &
oceans, as well as underground water reserves. The use of many wireless distributed sensors
enables the creation of a more accurate map of the water status, and allows the permanent
deployment of monitoring stations in locations of difficult access, without the need of manual
data retrieval.
Natural disaster prevention
Wireless sensor networks can effectively act to prevent the consequences of natural
disasters, like floods. Wireless nodes have successfully been deployed in rivers where
changes of the water levels have to be monitored in real time.
Machine health monitoring
Wireless sensor networks have been developed for machinery condition-based
maintenance (CBM) as they offer significant cost savings and enable new functionality.
Wireless sensors can be placed in locations difficult or impossible to reach with a wired
system, such as rotating machinery and untethered vehicles.
Data logging
Wireless sensor networks are also used for the collection of data for monitoring of
environmental information, this can be as simple as the monitoring of the temperature in a
fridge to the level of water in overflow tanks in nuclear power plants. The statistical
information can then be used to show how systems have been working. The advantage of
WSNs over conventional loggers is the "live" data feed that is possible.
Water/Waste water monitoring
Monitoring the quality and level of water includes many activities such as checking
the quality of underground or surface water and ensuring a countrys water infrastructure for
the benefit of both human and animal.It may be used to protect the wastage of water.

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Structural Health Monitoring

Wireless sensor networks can be used to monitor the condition of civil infrastructure
and related geo-physical processes close to real time, and over long periods through data
logging, using appropriately interfaced sensors.

CHAPTER 4
SYSTEM DESIGN
WSN consisting of fixed BS and all leaf nodes, which are homogeneous in nature
with same functionality. The BS is always reliable and trusted authorized user, where the
sensor nodes may compromised by unauthorized user and transmission path may be
interrupted by unauthorized user. In WSN, sensor nods are grouped into clusters and every
cluster has CH nodes, which can be selected randomly. A Non-CH node (leaf node) joins
clusters depending on strength of received signal from BS. CH performs data collection and
transmission towards BS with high energy than leaf node.
The LEACH protocol used for implementation of WSN. Low Energy Adaptive
Clustering Hierarchy (LEACH) protocol has attracted intensive attention because of its
energy efficient, simplicity and load balancing properties. LEACH is a cluster based protocol.
The numbers of cluster heads and cluster members generated by LEACH are important
parameters for achieving better performance. LEACH organizes nodes into clusters with one
node from each cluster serving as a cluster-head (CH). It randomly selects some
predetermined number of nodes as cluster heads. CHs then advertise themselves and other
nodes join one of those cluster heads whose signal they found strongest (i.e. the CH which is
nearest to them). In this way a cluster is formed. The CH then makes a Time Division
Multiple Access (TDMA) schedule for the nodes under its cluster. The communication
between different clusters is done through CHs in a Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA)
manner. The CHs collect the data from their clusters and aggregate it before sending it to the
other CHs or base station (BS). After a predetermined time lapse, the cluster formation step is

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repeated so that different nodes are given a chance to become CHs and energy consumption is
thus uniformly distributed.

Fig 4.1 Diagram Of TDMA Slots.

Operation: LEACH operation is broken into rounds, with each round having a set-up phase
and a steady state phase.
Set-up phase: Each node decides whether or not to be a cluster-head based on its remaining
energy and a globally known desired percentage of cluster heads. Each node electing itself as
a cluster-head broadcasts an advertisement message announcing its intention. Non cluster
head nodes receive possibly several advertisements and pick one cluster to join based on the
signal strength of the advertisement received from the corresponding cluster-head
Steady-state phase: Each cluster-head waits to receive data from all nodes in its cluster and
then sends the aggregated or compressed result back to a BS.

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Fig 4.2 Cluster Head Formation

Weaknesses: Clustering is a good approach which, if implemented properly, can lead to
energy efficient networking in WSNs. Despite the significant overall energy savings,
however, the assumptions made by the protocol raise a number of issues as explained in [4]:
LEACH assumes that all nodes can communicate with each other and are able to reach the
sink (therefore, it is only suitable for small size networks), LEACH assumes that all nodes
have data to send and so assign a time slot for a node even though some nodes might not have
data to transmit, LEACH assumes that all nearby nodes have correlated data which is not
always true, LEACH requires that all nodes are continuously listening ( this is not realistic in
a random distribution of the sensor nodes, for example, where cluster-heads would be located
at the edge of the network), there is no mechanism to ensure that the elected cluster-heads
will be uniformly distributed over the network ( hence, there is the possibility that all cluster
heads will be concentrated in one part of the network), periodic dynamic clustering carries
significant overhead which may off-set energy gains derived by the clustering option.

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Fig. 4.3

50 Random Nodes Distribution In LEACH

SET-ABE algorithm is implemented for secure data transfer in WSN. It has four
operations: setup, key Generation, Encryption, Decryption.
1) Set up: The authority user as BS generates Master Key and public key parameter for
generation of private key and send them to all sensor nodes in cluster.
2) Key Generation: The authority executes and generates private key for data user.
3) Encryption: Data owner encrypt messages with set of attributes.
4) Decryption: Data user decrypt the encrypted message with private key and verifies
receiving output is acceptable or not which depends on attribute matching.

Fig 4.4 Working Block Diagram Of The System

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Fig.4.5 Flowchart For Operation In SET-ABE

SET-ABOOS operates similar way to that of SET-ABE. The main goal in
online/offline setting is to allow precomputation of attribute based chipher text as possible
without knowing about cipher policy or attribute set.
SET-ABOOS implemented with five operations: Setup, Extract, Offline Encryption, Online
Encryption and Decryption.
1) Set up: This algorithm takes input as security parameters and set of attributes in system
and generates master key and public parameters.
2) Extract: This algorithm takes input as set of attribute and master key in order to generate
private key associated with set of attribute.
3) Offline Encryption: This algorithm takes parameter and generates output as intermediate
cipher text.

Secure And Efficient Data Transfer For Hierarchical Based Wireless Sensor
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4) Online Encryption: This algorithm takes input as public parameter, set of attribute and
intermediate cipher text and generate output as session key and cipher text.
5) Decryption: this algorithm takes input as private key and cipher text in order to
decapsulate cipher text to get original message and to recover session key only if it satisfy
attribute constrain.

CONCLUSION
Wireless sensor network (WSN) is the network of hundreds and thousands of microsensor nodes, connecting each other by a wireless medium.WSN provide reliable sensing of
the environment, detecting and reporting events to the sink. The main objective of
hierarchical data aggregation is to increase the network lifetime by reducing the resource
consumption of sensor nodes.
In this scheme, design and developed two protocol scheme in order to get secure and
efficient data transfer over WSN, such as SET-ABE and SET-ABOOS based on Attribute
based encryption. As well as it provide security towards orphan node problem in secure data

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transmission. Due to use of hierarchical architecture provides balanced energy consumption

on every sensor node.

REFERENCES
[1] W. Heinzelman, A. Chandrakasan, and H. Balakrishnan, An Application-Specific
Protocol Architecture for Wireless Microsensor Networks, IEEE Trans. Wireless Comm.,
vol. 1, no. 4, pp. 660- 670, Oct. 2002.
[2] Manjeshwar, Q.-A. Zeng, and D.P. Agrawal, An Analytical Model for Information
Retrieval in Wireless Sensor Networks Using Enhanced APTEEN Protocol, IEEE Trans.
Parallel & Distributed Systems, vol. 13, no. 12, pp. 1290-1302, Dec. 2002.
[3] S. Yi et al., PEACH: Power-Efficient and Adaptive Clustering Hierarchy Protocol for
Wireless Sensor Networks Computer Comm., vol. 30, nos. 14/15, pp. 2842-2852, 2007.

Secure And Efficient Data Transfer For Hierarchical Based Wireless Sensor
Networks

[4] Cheng-chi Lee,Pei-Shan chung,and Min-Shiang Hwang Asurvey on Attribute-based

Encryption Scheme of Access Contol in Cloud Environment, International Journal of
Network Security, Vol.15,No.4,PP.231-240,July2013.
[5] Susan Hohenberger, Brent Waters Online/Offline Attribute-Based Encryption,2007.
[11] Susan Hohenberger, Brent Waters Attribute-Based Encryption with Fast Decryption,8
may 2013.