An Energy-Efficient Secure Forwarding Scheme for QoS Guarantee in Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Many wireless sensor network (WSN) applications require both security and quality-of-service (QoS) to be guaranteed simultaneously. However, ensuring both security and QoS is not trivial in WSNs since security normally has bad impact on QoS. In this paper, we propose an energy-efficient secure forwarding method that minimizes energy consumption while meeting both security and QoS requirements at the same time. To accomplish this goal, we alternatively use hop-by-hop security for conserving energy through data aggregation and end-to-end security to satisfy the QoS requirement. We further analyze why hop-by-hop security with data aggregation provide better energy efficiency than end-to-end security without aggregation in detail. The simulation result shows that our proposed method outperforms other scheme in terms of energy efficiency while meeting both QoS and security.