Abstract

A Wireless Sensor Networks is a large network of resource-constrained sensor nodes with multiple preset functions, such as sensing and processing, to fulfil different application objectives. Usually, sensor nodes are deployed in a designated area by an authority such as the government or a military unit and then automatically form a network through wireless communications. Designing cost-efficient, secure Wireless Sensor Networks is a challenging problem because sensors are resource-limited wireless devices. Since the communication cost is the most dominant factor in a sensor’s energy consumption, so the proposed work introduce an energy-efficient Secure Virtual Energy-Based Hop by Hop dynamic key Encryption scheme for WSNs which reduces communication overheads required to exchange the messages to update the dynamic key in the network. In the proposed work a key used in the encryption or decryption function changes dynamically by using the concept of virtual energy. The virtual energy (VE) is a numeric value that is assign to each node before the deployment of network. This VE changes dynamically whenever a function is performed by the node in the network. Thus, a one-time key is used to encode one packet only and different keys are used for other packets. The receiving node known as watch node (WN), will calculate the key used in decryption process as a predicted value as the same value used by the sending node in the encryption process. So with the help of this predicted value, the receiving node is able to verify the integrity and authenticity of the message. Thus there is no need for the communication of extra control messages to update the dynamic key. The problem with the existing schemes to generate a dynamic key with the help of a virtual energy is that every time the predicted value is generated, the same amount of value is decremented in each function but in proposed scheme this value dynamically changes as a function over time. So it is impossible for intruder to know the key value of any node. Simulation result proves that the proposed scheme is more secure than other scheme in the same area.