A Secure LEACH Protocol for Efficient CH Selection and Secure Data Communication in WSNs

Due to the applications of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) in distinct fields, like civilian and military, environmental monitoring, and target tracking, etc., it became the important research area for researchers. Therefore, an efficient organization of network topology is needed for multi-hop data aggregation based on the energy constrained WSNs with large scale deployment for making the routing task simpler, balancing the load efficiently, and enhancing the network lifetime. The low-energy adaptive clustering hierarchy (LEACH) is an architecture of application-specific protocol, which is used for WSNs. However, this LEACH protocol suffered from more energy consumption in network without considering the cluster heads (CHs) distribution on a rotation basis. In addition, the complex security mechanisms are not sufficient due to limited bandwidth and other restrictions that the sensor nodes have. Thus, it is essential to improve the energy efficiency, CH stability and secure data transmission in WSN’s, which is the main objective of this work. Motivated from these three challenges, this article proposes a stable and secure LEACH (SS-LEACH), in which a new and improved protocol of LEACH is proposed for enhancing the stability of CH and energy efficiency as it considers the nodes’ consumed energy ratio (CER) for CH selection and random number generation, here after the proposed LEACH is named as CER-LEACH. In addition, it aims to prevent the previously elected CH node and it will get another chance in the current round. This method correlates the threshold used in traditional LEACH with the energy consumption ratio of each node. Further, it also introduces a hybrid reputation-based data transmission (HRDT) scheme for secure data transmission. With the proposed CER-LEACH protocol, WSNs achieves better performance in terms of secured communication, network lifetime, and energy consumption based on the analysis of simulation results as compared to state-of-art approaches.