BLOCKCHAIN BASED SECURE ANDENERGY EFFICIENT ROUTING PROTOCOLFORWSN

Abstract

Routing in a Wireless Network Sensor (WSN) is a critical process as it is basically responsible for transmitting the data to Base Stations (BS). WSNs are used in a wide range of applications that require the data to be transmitted and received securely, such as in battlefield surveillance, flood detection, forest fire detection, traffic surveillance, etc. But the actual routing process is susceptible to attacks that can completely destroy the operation of the WSN. The intervention from malicious nodes is one of them. Malicious nodes can send erroneous information of particular lengths to other nodes in order to increase their chance of receiving the data that is being transmitted. The malicious nodes can also send corrupted data to other nodes and cause the operation of WSNs to fail. Hence, a trustworthy routing system is a must in orderto ensure that the WSN will operate smoothly and efficiently. An authentication scheme is introduced that is blockchain-based, so as to provide secure routing in the WSNs. As there are unauthenticated and malicious nodes that affect the routing process, the correct identification of the routing path becomes a challenging issue. Therefore, in our model, to prevent the involvement of these malicious nodes in the network, the registration of the nodes is done by a Certificate Authority Node. Each node that is involved in the routing gets authenticated by the BS and a mutual authentication is also performed. Furthermore, in the proposed routing protocol, a Cluster Head (CH)is used. The selection of a CH node is based on the residual energy of the node and the node which has the minimum distance from BS. This CH collects the data from the other nodes and sends it forwards to the BS. Every node can authenticate the process of transmitting or receiving data using a Proof of Authority (PoA) method in the blockchain network.