An innovative approach of blending security features in energy-efficient routing for a crowded network of wireless sensors

Wireless sensor networks (WSN) are emerging as both an important new tier in the IT (information technology) ecosystem and a rich domain of active research involving hardware and system design, networking, distributed algorithms, programming models, data management, security, and social factors [1,2]. The basic idea of a sensor network is to disperse tiny sensing devices over a specific target area. These devices are capable of sensing certain changes of incidents or parameters and of communicating with other devices. WSNs could be very useful for providing support for some specific purposes, such as target tracking, surveillance, environmental monitoring, etc. Today’s sensors can monitor temperature, pressure, humidity, soil makeup, vehicular movement, noise levels, lighting conditions, the presence or absence of certain kinds of objects or substances, mechanical stress levels on attached objects, and other properties. As such types of networks are composed of resource-constrained tiny sensor nodes, many research works have tried to focus on efficient use of the available resources of the sensors. Energy is, in fact, one of the most critical factors that play a great role to define the duration of an active and operable network. Energy efficiency is often very crucial in these sorts of networks as the power sources of the inexpensive sensors are (in most of the cases) not replaceable after deployment. If any intermediate node between any two communicating nodes runs out of battery power, the link between the end nodes is eventually broken. So any protocol should ensure a competent way of utilizing the energies of the sensors so that a fair connectivity of the network could be ensured throughout its operation time. Energy efficiency is also very necessary to maximize the lifetime of the network

A low power IoT sensor node architecture for waste management within smart cities context

This paper focuses on the realization of an Internet of Things (IoT) architecture to optimize waste management in the context of Smart Cities. In particular, a novel typology of sensor node based on the use of low cost and low power components is described. This node is provided with a single-chip microcontroller, a sensor able to measure the filling level of trash bins using ultrasounds and a data transmission module based on the LoRa LPWAN (Low Power Wide Area Network) technology. Together with the node, a minimal network architecture was designed, based on a LoRa gateway, with the purpose of testing the IoT node performances. Especially, the paper analyzes in detail the node architecture, focusing on the energy saving technologies and policies, with the purpose of extending the batteries lifetime by reducing power consumption, through hardware and software optimization. Tests on sensor and radio module effectiveness are also presented

A secure energy-efficient routing protocol for WSN

The intent of this paper is to propose an energy-efficient routing protocol with data transmission security for wireless sensor networks. We create an energy and distance aware sink-rooted tree in the network which is used for secure data transmissions from the source sensors to the base station. We mainly focus on ensuring authenticity and confidentiality of the sensor reports by adopting one-way hash chain and pre-loaded shared secret keys. To achieve data freshness, there is an optional key refreshment mechanism in our protocol. Along with the detailed description of our protocol, we present an analysis and performance evaluation of our proposal