A survey on secure multipath routing protocols in WSNs

Abstract

Routing protocols in wireless sensor networks (WSN) have been substantially investigated by researches. Most state-of-the-art surveys have focused on reviewing the different routing schemes that have been proposed for WSN and classifying them based on the network's type and protocol's operation. Security aspects in routing protocols have not been given enough attention, since most of the routing protocols in WSNs have not been designed with security requirements in mind. However, taking into consideration that WSN applications need to support critical infrastructures (i.e., military, healthcare, environmental, etc.), security becomes an issue. And since these infrastructures are highly depended on the availability of resources, focus has especially been given to support a secure, resilient and reliable environment, with multipath routing being one of the added functionalities. The need for security in sensitive WSN application has lead researchers to design secure multipath routing protocols from the beginning or design security extensions for existing protocols. This paper surveys the current state-of-the-art of secure multipath routing protocols in WSNs, classifies the protocols in categories according to their security-related operational objectives, defines a new threat model in the routing procedure and identifies open research issues in the area. © 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.