SEE2PK: Secure and energy efficient protocol based on pairwise key for hierarchical wireless sensor network

In wireless sensor networks (WSN), sensor nodes communicate with one another and transfer the sensed data to the sink over a wireless medium, making the network vulnerable to a variety of security flaws, including eavesdropping. To provide a secure communication, encryption techniques based on some keys need to be used, and the participating sensor nodes should agree with it. The sensor nodes are resource constrained in terms of energy, memory, and processing power. As a result, the key agreement technique in WSN is nontrivial. Therefore, many key agreement techniques have been developed, however most of them focus primarily on security, which is not considered a relevant concern in the context of energy efficiency. There is a compromise between energy usage and security, so we've proposed an algorithm to address it. Also, the nodes in WSN can be benefited by using symmetric based pairwise key establishment for efficient communication in the network. The proposed algorithm strikes a crucial balance between secure routing and energy consumption within wireless sensor networks, outperforming well-established routing algorithms by delivering optimal results. In this paper, we have proposed a Secure and Energy Efficient Protocol Based on Pairwise Key (SEE2PK) for WSN. In the proposed scheme, nodes need to store only one row of the secure matrix and establish secure communication after exchanging one column of a public matrix, which is based on the neighbor adjacency matrix of a cluster. This scheme benefits from using a mesh router as a Cluster Head (CH) due to more memory and computation power. The storage and computation costs are decreased by employing the adjacency matrix as a public matrix. The performance of secure routing is examined with the standard techniques, and the results indicate that: 1) nodes can establish pairwise communication with other nodes; 2) performance of the proposed scheme is better for network metrics: network lifetime, security, computation cost, scalability, and energy consumption; 3) communication cost and storage cost of the network are decreased.